19. A mummified body toured America as that of John Wilkes Booth in the early 20th century
In 1877, a man believed to be dying and known as John St. Helen informed a lawyer, Finis L. Bates, he was in fact, John Wilkes Booth. St. Helen told Bates the assassination had been masterminded by Andrew Johnson, and that he escaped the pursuit and drifted across the West under several different aliases. St. Helen recovered and vanished. In 1903, Bates saw an article describing the death by suicide of a man in Enid, Oklahoma. The article featured a post-mortem photograph of the man, known as David Elihu George. Allegedly, following an earlier, failed suicide attempt, George claimed he was John Wilkes Booth. According to Bates, the man in the photograph was the same as the man he had known as John St. Helen. For the next several years the mummified body of St. Helen/George decorated the front parlor of an Enid mortuary.
In 1907 Bates published The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth: Written for the Correction of History. Following publication, Bates acquired the mummified corpse and displayed it at state fairs, carnivals, and holiday celebrations across the country. The mummy continued to be a sideshow attraction into the 1950s, under various owners, the last of which was Jay Gould. Its current whereabouts is uncertain. What is known is that in the 1930s, Chicago doctors examined the body and declared that its broken leg, and the scar on the neck, and a healed broken thumb were all consistent with known injuries to John Wilkes Booth. They declared the corpse genuine. They neglected to note the broken leg endured by the man in life was his right. When Dr. Samuel Mudd set Booth’s leg in the early morning of April 15, 1865, it was his left.
