If you are just joining us please find part 1 & 2 here.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
Now is where this story crosses the line from mysterious to bizarre. In 1903, in Enid, Oklahoma, a local house painter with a fondness for drink and for reciting Shakespeare, going by the name of David E. George, had committed suicide by ingesting a large quantity of arsenic. Shortly after George’s death, Rev. Enoch Harper came to view the body and relayed a story to the undertaker who was embalming the body. In April 1900, George had reportedly confessed to Mrs. Jessie Kuhn, the reverend’s fiancé, that he was John Wilkes Booth. Mrs. Kuhn had then dismissed the confessions as the product of drug-induced delirium. George was also quoted as saying, “I killed the best man that ever lived.”
The undertaker, William Penniman, hesitated to have George buried until the body could be claimed. On December 31, 1902, George had drawn up a will with local lawyer Niles Houston, and it was filed with the local probate court on January 16, 1903. However, the property listed in the will proved to be non-existent, and the body remained unclaimed and unburied at Penniman’s. The arsenic embalmed body sat for eight years on display in Enid at Penniman’s establishment. Penniman had tied the body to a chair, opened its eyes, and placed a newspaper in its lap, creating a spectacle for passersby in the Enid downtown. A local boy led dime tours into the funeral home to view the mummified body where it lay on a shelf. According to Penniman, 10,000 people viewed George’s body in Enid, including a few who clipped hair, buttons, and one even attempted to remove his ear.
Other papers found on George requested Finis Bates to be summoned. On January 23, 1903, Bates identified the body as that of his old acquaintance John St. Helen. Ultimately, with no one else to claim it, and after years on “display”, the body ended up in Bates’ care. Bates stored it in the garage of his home in Memphis, Tennessee, and toured the alleged mummy of Booth in circus sideshows for years. The body was shown at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair but was rejected by the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. In 1920, Bates tried to sell it to automaker Henry Ford for $1,000, but Ford declined. A carnival barker named William B. Evans rented the mummy in 1920, paying Bates $1,000 every five months. That year, while traveling to San Diego, the mummy came out unscathed in a tragic train wreck that claimed eight lives. Before Evans could restart his tour, the mummy was stolen. Evans ran ads offering a $1,000 reward for its return. Eventually, the kidnapper himself turned in the mummy for its reward.
Evans wanted to return it to Finis Bates, but Bates had died in 1923. Bates’ widow sold the mummy to Evans for the usual sum of $1,000. Evans displayed the mummy at his farm for several more years. Kansas City lawyer, James Wilkerson, an expert on John Wilkes Booth, examined the mummy in 1928, comparing its scars to those of Booth, and began touring the Southwest with it. Enraged by its presence, Veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic threatened to lynch the mummy. Wilkerson and Evans were often run out of town by health officials and policemen and, ultimately, the two disbanded.
In 1931, the Chicago Press Club hired six doctors led by Dr. Orlando Franke Scott (1885–1950) to examine the mummy. Part of their description described, “a scarred right eyebrow that arched upwards, a thickening on the knuckle joint of the right thumb, and a piece of skin missing from the back of the neck” and “X-rays of the head, hands, and legs showed a thickening of the tissues over the right eyebrow, a thickening in the bones of the right thumb, and a marked thickening of the left fibula at its lower end, indicating an earlier fracture.” The results were not conclusive nor widely accepted. The event was viewed as a publicity stunt, and the doctors did not examine other elements such as height and facial features. X-rays from this examination were later displayed with the body, which now had a large opening in its backside as a result. Somehow, the concept that this had once been a living, breathing human being had been lost long before.
In 1932, the maudlin journey continued as Joseph Harkin bought the mummy, then named “John,” for $5,000. Joseph and his wife, Agnes, shared the back of a truck with “John” by night and displayed him by day. After some years the mummy was seized as collateral for debt repayment. It next surfaced in the 1950s, when “John” was stored in a Philadelphia basement. A man purchased “John” from a female landlord who had held it as collateral for $15.00 and went to Philadelphia to claim it, but when he arrived, the entire neighborhood had been razed, and “John” was gone. It was last seen in a midwestern carnival in the late 1970s. Though rumors surface from time to time, the final or current resting place of the remains of this man who may have changed the course of history remains a sad question for the ages.
But even more questions remain. Back in 1865, when government doctors did the autopsy on the body from Garrett’s barn, before sending it off for burial they removed two vertebrae to keep as “evidence” for posterity that Booth had indeed been captured and killed. Those vertebrae are still “on file” at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Over the years, four different times the Booth family descendants have petitioned to exhume the body of Edwin Booth, John’s brother, to obtain DNA for comparison with DNA from the vertebrae. Every time (most recently in 2011) a local judge approved the exhumation, but a federal court overruled, refusing access to the vertebrae “on the grounds of national security.”
Many people take this repeated denial as proof that the federal government has always known that the body at Garrett’s barn was not Booth. The last living descendant of Ida Booth, Booth/St. Helen’s alleged daughter, died in 2011, before DNA science advanced enough to prove descent from so many generations removed. So again, unless the mummy can be found, any provable answers are lost to the mists of time. Some suggest that John St. Helen, the man who confessed to being “John Wilkes Booth” to attorney Finis Bates, is a different man from the person who married Louisa Payne. My research suggests they are the same man. This man, Jack Booth/John St. Helen/David E. George, was either a deluded and deceptive man who pretended to be John Wilkes Booth for over four decades or, as many descendants of the Booth family and countless others have believed, this man who shouted Shakespeare from a tabletop in Granbury, Texas, was actually the man who shot Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth himself.
