Did Lincoln’s assassin escape in a cover-up?

Mysterious circumstances and possibly a past-life regression could cast some light on a riddle.

 

In my article “Are facts important to a soul” I refer to a “fifth case” mentioned by Ian Stevenson as being contradictory to the reality of past-life regression experiences. It is the case of “A subject regressed to a previous life said that he was John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln”. Stevenson dismisses this too easily as “foolishness”. Merely playing the “devils advocate” I suggested that one may not completely be unable to exclude the possibility of a cover-up about Booth, not yet knowing what I would later find out about the case… the first reference I found (see below) was written about in a later issue of the same magazine, in which my article was published. Therefore, I will here briefly review relevant details.

 

Official version

Abraham Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, who 11 days later was found in a barn at Bowling Green, Virginia. The barn was set on fire and a shot was heard inside. Some claim that he was shot by a soldier, others that it was suicide. His body was identified by a physician, who had earlier operated Booth, and it was hurriedly and secretly buried in a cemetery.

 

Doubts

Many believe this was part of a cover-up and that Booth escaped, had a child a year later and lived for 37 more years in Mississippi and Texas, and that he killed himself in 1903. Three women claim to be direct descendents through his child. Booth’s diary was impounded by Stanton, Secretary of War at the time, and released two years later, but then 18 pages were missing. His co-conspirators were treated in such a way that they were unable to speak and hence couldn’t give any statements.

A book written by the lawyer Finis L. Bates claims that the author knew a man who called himself John St. Helen, who contacted him at Granbury, Texas, in 1877. Believing that he was dying from pneumonia, he confessed to being Booth and explained that the soldiers had killed a man named Robey who had Booth’s diary in the pocket. John St. Helen later recovered. In 1903, the author read about a suicide of David E. George in Enid, Oklahoma, who had told the hotel owner and an acquaintance that he was Booth and then killed himself with arsenic. When Bates showed them a photograph “John St. Helen” had given him 26 years earlier, they both identified him with George. According to his papers, he was born the same year as Booth.

A team of physicians from the University of Chicago Medical School came to examine the body of George and concluded that it probably was Booth, based on a leg injury he suffered right after the murder and a tattoo JWB on his chest.

 

Did a past-life regression cast some light on the mystery?

In 1975 a book The Reincarnation of John Wilkes Booth was published, written by a female hypnotist Dr. Dell Leonardi in Kansas City, based on 73 hours of taped conversations. A 21-year old man called Wesley had under hypnosis claimed to have been Booth in his last previous life. He had escaped and fled to San Francisco, and later went to England to finally die a natural death in Calais, France.

He said that he had been a leading member of a secret group named The Knights of the Golden Circle, which had planned to dominate much of the world by controlling the production and export of vital products. The above-mentioned Secretary of War, Stanton, was claimed to have been a member.

In the regression, Wesley had said that he escaped from the US in 1865-66 with a ship that had “Margaret” in the name and a master named Henrichsen. It was found that 10 ships of the British merchant fleet at the time had “Margaret” in their names. One was called “Margaret Kinch” and was under the command of captain C. Henrichsen and made regular runs between Liverpool and San Francisco. The real identity of Wesley was never revealed.

It has been confirmed that John Wilkes Booth was a member of The Knights of the Golden Circle (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Golden_Circle). It is, of course, possible that Wesley may have known this.

 

Exhumation?

It was requested to exhume the alleged body of Booth at the Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland, for an investigation for the purpose of a possible verification of the identity. The appeal was turned down by a court in 1995, claiming that the book by Bates would be a fraud and that the autopsy carried out on Booth’s body aboard the river steam ship “Montauk”, which transported the body, would have given sufficient evidence.

 

Cover-up, or not?

The data neither contradict nor support the cover-up theory. It obviously cannot be excluded that either the wrong man was killed in the barn at Bowling Green and Booths escaped, but that the authorities didn’t want to admit this failure, or that members of a group that had planned the murder were influential enough to arrange for a cover-up, not the least in order to protect themselves from having their own involvement uncovered. The book by Bates and the information stated to have surfaced in Leonardi’s regression may more or less agree in several points, but they do disagree as concerns Booths “real” death and where he died. Yet it cannot be stated, as Stevenson did, that Wilkes Booth’s death in the barn in Virginia would have been clearly proven by careful identification of the body and that, therefore, the regression experience would simply be “foolishness”. Too many unanswered questions remain, the mystery is not clarified and the theory of a cover-up still remains a real possibility. An exhumation might have given a definite answer, but was turned down – a last part of a cover-up?

 

References