Booth mounted the horse and swept rapidly down an alley, then to the left toward F Street--and disappeared into the Washington darkness. Everton Conger and two other investigators pulled Willie Jett out of a bed in a hotel in Bowling Green to demand, "Where are the two men who came with you across the river? When Jett had talked with the two conspirators they had made no effort to hide their identity. Herold had boldly declared, "We are the assassinators of the President. Yonder is J. Wilkes Booth, the man who killed Lincoln.
Reaching Garrett's farm, the government party ordered an old man, Garrett, out of his home and asked, "Where are the two men who stopped here at your house? Unsatisfied with Garrett's response, Conger told one of his men, "Bring me a lariat rope here, and I will put that man up to the top of one of those locust trees.
Finding the suspects to be in the Garrett barn, Conger gave Booth and Herold five minutes to get out or, he said, he would set fire to it.
Booth responded, "Let us have a little time to consider it. Conger lit the fire minutes later. With flames rising around him, Booth, carrying a carbine, started toward the door of the barn. A shot rang out from the gun of Sergeant Boston Corbett.
Booth fell. Frustrated at seeing his plot foiled, Booth resolved to go to a far greater extreme. On April 14, , just after 10 p.
Directly after the shooting, Booth leaped onto the stage and yelled, "Sic semper tyrannis! Thusever to tyrants! The South is avenged! Booth reportedly broke his leg in the process, but managed to make it to his getaway horse before anyone in the shocked crowd could stop him. After crossing the Potomac River with some difficulty, Booth and his co-conspirators arrived at Richard H. Garrett's farm in Port Royal, Virginia. Investigators were in hot pursuit and on April 26, , caught up to the criminals, who had been hiding in Garrett's barn.
Booth refused to surrender, which spurred his pursuers to set the barn on fire. As the blaze engulfed the barn, Booth was shot by one of the investigators, Thomas P. Corbett had intended to shoot Booth in the arm, but his bullet struck Booth's neck instead.
In late , Booth and others began to craft a plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln in order to ransom him for the release of southern prisoners of war. However, following the surrender of Robert E.
On April 14, while Lincoln was attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater, a venue that Booth was extremely familiar with, Booth crept into the Presidential box and shot Lincoln in the back of the head.
Pursued for 12 days by the largest manhunt in United States history, he was trapped in a barn on the Garrett farm in Virginia, where he was fatally shot.
Explore This Park. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. He paged through it, flipping to the final illustrated plate. There he saw the familiar face of John Wilkes Booth juxtaposed with a picture of a dead man sitting in a chair.
In the right cast of mind you might see a resemblance between the two, accede that the dapper, year-old star on the right could have sagged and drooped over 40 years to become the swollen, mummified body on the left.
As the story went, George had several times confessed to being John Wilkes Booth, even going so far as to admit, "I killed the best man that ever lived. A lawyer named Finis L. George, how the man had confessed, and how his tale offered "a correction of history. It was as though a quest had opened before him, this bookishly serious but charismatic young man.
He had found not just a puzzle, but an opportunity to set things right. From his father, who had marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, who when watching sports always rooted for the underdog, and who unapologetically believed that one man could save the world — from him Orlowek learned that when something is wrong, you should try to change it. We should fight to change them. Nate Orlowek has spent 40 years investigating whether Booth died in the barn — or escaped to Oklahoma.
Family photographs flank the couch. You could wonder whether it has consumed him, this quest to correct history. When he warms to the subject he speaks quickly, punctuating his points with a defiantly raised finger, his tales digressive, his facts precise.
So why John Wilkes Booth? Like his father he wanted a cause bigger than himself; like his father he wanted to save the world. He took to his cause with the zeal of an idealistic teenager.
He recruited friends. He combed archives. When the Library of Congress told him he was too young to do research there, he cornered his senator in an elevator and, soon enough, got his access. Not only that, but he gained entrance to the rare books room. The media flocked to him. Local television, newspapers, and radio. A lot of radio. And then, in July , Rolling Stone. Orlowek soon signed on as a consultant for The Lincoln Conspiracy , billed as "a story every American has the right to know.
Even in a post-JFK assassination, post-Watergate era, with audiences deeply cynical about government, the theory had limited popular appeal.
Historians were appalled. Afterward, Orlowek found himself drifting away from the work. Because what more could he do? Continue digging through history, hoping to find that one irrefutable piece of half-buried evidence? What were the chances of that? He turned to more tangible goals, petitioning President Carter to clear the name of Dr.
Samuel Mudd. Only after another researcher contacted him a dozen years later, in , did Orlowek again take up his case in earnest. He traveled to Enid, Oklahoma, where locals had tried to interest the wildly popular TV series Unsolved Mysteries in a story about their famous mummy. His zeal renewed, Orlowek signed on to help. Two years later, the segment aired: a full 20 minutes devoted to the now-mysterious body in the barn.
Host Robert Stack solemnly intoned, "Those who question the official account believe that in the confusion following the Civil War, critical evidence may have been mistakenly recorded or perhaps covered up. Other s dismiss these theories as revisionist nonsense. Opposite him, historian James O. Hall cantankerously dismissed this "evidence" as poorly sourced, speculative, or contradicted by more persuasive evidence.
He finally scoffed, "I see no mystery about it at all. But a show called Unsolved Mysteries was unlikely to agree. Over an image of the marble stele marking the family plot, Stack pondered, "Perhaps there lies the definitive proof to this unsolved mystery. Nate Orlowek chose to seize the Booth mystery.
Joanne Hulme, however, was born into it. That bloodline meant hearing from an early age that the assassin had escaped Union justice, and that the body buried in Green Mount Cemetery did not belong to her family. She first heard about it in the summer before sixth grade, when her mother told her she was being dramatic, just like her relatives. That meant Edwin Booth, and, yes, his brother, John Wilkes Booth, who Hulme until then had known as a presidential assassin, not a distant relative.
The family had always known it, and Edwin provided money for him.
0コメント