Did He Go To Hell Or Texas?
By Martha Deeringer
According to most historical accounts, John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, perished shortly after being shot inside a burning barn in Virginia nearly 150 years ago. But tales of a man resembling Booth pop up in Glen Rose, Texas, and later in Granbury, starting five years after the April 14, 1865, assassination of the president.
Stories of Booth’s alleged miraculous escape are exhumed every few years to play again in the media. Booth, a Shakespearean actor, probably would have loved the attention.
Most historians don’t have a problem with the government’s identification of Booth’s body in 1865. A soldier reportedly shot him silhouetted inside a burning barn at Garrett’s tobacco farm in Virginia on April 26, and he died several hours laters.
But here’s where the details of the accounts begin to diverge. Two lieutenants at the scene said the body was Booth’s, but a sergeant and a trooper stated that the man who died had freckles and red hair and was not Booth.
Booth had a clear complexion and jet-black hair and, as is described in some historical accounts, broke his left leg when his spur caught in a decorative flag as he leapt from the president’s box to the stage at Ford’s Theatre the night he shot Lincoln. In some versions of the story, the man shot to death at Garrett’s farm had a broken right leg. A high degree of secrecy surrounded the hurried autopsy and initial burial in 1865, contributing to the mystery. Ultimately, over the next four years, what most historians say was Booth’s body was twice exhumed and twice reburied.
Meanwhile, in 1870, a handsome, black-haired stranger took a job as a storekeeper in Glen Rose. He also performed in amateur theatrical productions and astounded the residents with his acting skill and knowledge of Shakespeare. The man introduced himself as John St. Helen and had a gimpy left leg. When he discovered a year later that a large wedding was scheduled to take place in Glen Rose attended by many army officers and U.S. marshals, St. Helen quietly departed.
Not long afterward, the man resurfaced in Granbury, where he fell in with a lawyer named Finis L. Bates. In Granbury, St. Helen worked as a bartender in a saloon, but his friend Bates noticed that the man never touched a drop of “demon rum,” or liquor, except on April 14—the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination—at which time he drank himself into a stupor. The significance of these yearly binges didn’t register with Bates until he was called to St. Helen’s bedside one night where he found his friend desperately ill. A doctor had informed St. Helen that he might not last the night. In weakened whispers the dying man spoke to his friend.
“My name is John Wilkes Booth, and I am the assassin of Abraham Lincoln,” he said. St. Helen’s deathbed proclamation was premature. He recovered.
As soon as he could travel, John St. Helen packed up and left Granbury. Searching St. Helen’s room after his disappearance, Bates reportedly found a Colt single-shot pocket pistol wrapped in the front page of a Washington, D.C., newspaper dated April 15, 1865, which bore the story of Lincoln’s assassination.
In 1903, a house painter named David George committed suicide in Enid, Oklahoma. As one story goes, before his death, he confessed to his landlady, Mrs. E.C. Harper, that he was, in fact, John Wilkes Booth. George was 63, the same age Booth would have been. To make matters more interesting, he had once suffered a broken left leg, improperly set.
When Bates heard of this occurrence, he rushed to Oklahoma and identified the corpse as the man he had known as John St. Helen. Bates took possession of the body and offered it to federal authorities. They weren’t interested.
Did John Wilkes Booth escape arrest and live out the remainder of his life in Texas and Oklahoma? Nate Orlowek, a historian and John Wilkes Booth researcher from Silver Spring, Maryland, believes so.
“There is tremendous physical evidence that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that John Wilkes Booth, in reality, was not killed by the federal government officers as they claimed,” Orlowek said.
It’s unfortunate that during his wanderings Booth didn’t make it to Hico and hook up with Brushy Bill Roberts, who claimed to be Billy the Kid. Now that would have made a really good story.
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Martha Deeringer, who lives in McGregor, has written several history articles for Texas Co-op Power.
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Did John Wilkes Booth go to Hell or to Texas?
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