Could John Wilkes Booth Have Committed Suicide at Garrett’s Farm? by William Lee Richter and Joseph E. “Rick” Smith III.
But, all this is debatable theory. The question remains: was Booth physically able to have committed suicide in such a way as to produce the type of wound from which he subsequently died? Noted assassination authority, Dr. John K. Lattimer, makes much of the fact that Booth could not have shot himself, because the "long-barreled" 1860 Colt's Army Model revolver was too heavy for Booth to manipulate to get his thumb on the trigger without using both hands. He was encumbered with the Spencer carbine or his crutch or both in his left hand. Moreover, Lattimer asserts, Booth could not have produced the angle of the bullet's path if he fired the gun with his thumb because his arm being held at his side would have prevented it.[15]
If Booth had tried to shoot himself with his index finger on the trigger, as a handgun is normally held and fired, Lattimer continues, Booth could not have reproduced the proper angle of the shot either. Lattimer made use of photographs to illustrate his point regarding the impossibility of Booth inflicting the wound which he sustained. In the photos, he has his demonstrator hold the weapon to his head with his elbow held down and close to his side. [16] If one holds the gun as Lattimer shows one ought, his story is correct. But, that is not the way a skilled shooter would do it. Rather than holding the weapon with our elbow at our side, we held it as any man familiar with firearms, as Booth was, [17] with our elbow out to the side and above our shoulder height. The revolver is held as normal, but with the barrel down and the handgrip up.
It is possible in this manner not only to duplicate the angle and trajectory of Booth's wound, but almost any angle ones wishes to achieve. The barrel is long, but not that long. Again, moving the elbow out away from one's side and holding it at shoulder height or above allows one to produce almost any angle of bullet path. And it can easily be done one-handed, without changing the normal grip on the revolver.
Lattimer also vetoes the notion that Booth could have committed suicide because the autopsy mentioned no powder burns or collateral damage a close shot would incur.[18] He shot pork necks and left them exposed to the elements for thirty hours, just as Booth's body was before autopsy, to reach his conclusion. The problem here is that Booth's decaying body was already blackened and distended so badly that initially the first witness to see him (Dr. John F. May, who had removed the boil or cyst from his neck two years earlier), had trouble identifying his horrible visage.[19] According to the Pima County (Arizona) medical examiner, consulted by us, under the right conditions, the body can blacken within twenty-four hours. It was very warm at the end of April 1865, and Booth's body was already in bad shape later on the day he was killed.
With humid weather, as in Virginia and Maryland, a dead body would tend to swell with retained fluids as it decays. Body decomposition does alter the shape and character of wounds. And it is also quite possible that experienced surgeons like Barnes and Woodward did not mention any marks of suicide, such as powder burns, not because they missed them, but because that is what Secretary of War Stanton instructed them to do. Further, forensic professionals say that gunpowder tattooing is left only when the weapon is not in contact with the skin. In any case, the possibility of suicide is neither ruled in nor out in the autopsy reports.
As to the assertion that Booth's collar would have caught fire had he shot himself, one wonders if a gun barrel pressed tight to the body might absorb such fire. Maybe his shirt had no collar (shirts made with detachable collars were a typical style of the time) to catch fire. It is another one of those things that was not mentioned in the autopsy reports. But Congressman and author David M. DeWitt emphasizes that Col. Conger thought that Booth "had the appearance of a man who put a pistol to his head and shot himself--shooting a little too low." [20]
According to Lt. Baker, [21] Booth no longer had the carbine, just a revolver in his hand, when Baker entered the barn after the shot rang out. Indeed, Baker said he had to twist the six-shooter out of Booth's iron grasp. But a man shot through the spinal cord as Booth had been (according to the autopsy report of Dr. J. Janvier Woodward, of the Army Medical Museum), [22] would not be able to hold anything. [23] According to the Pima County (Arizona) Medical Examiner, under the conditions described in the autopsy reports, Booth immediately would have been completely paralyzed from the neck (fourth vertebrae) down, as Barnes had reported. He would not have been rigid, but completely flaccid in his muscles and nerves--nothing functioning as it should. Booth would have dropped anything he was holding as the bullet severed his spinal cord. Lt. Baker either lied or exaggerated, possibly wanting to look like a daring man of action, or more worthy of a bigger share of the reward.
Regardless of whether Booth shot himself or someone else shot him, many, from Confederate Lieutenant M.B. Ruggles, one of those who took Booth to Garrett’s Farm, to modern historian Larry Starkey, questioned whether Sgt. Corbett actually did it. 24 Others saw it otherwise. Otto Eisenschiml concludes that Conger shot Booth to stop him from incriminating Stanton or other unnamed persons of note connected to the Federal government in Lincoln’s assassination.25 We doubt that, but the fact remains that Booth was physically able to produce the wound that Lattimer maintained he could not. But we agree, as one investigator says in Lattimer’s study, if Booth shot himself, he did it in the back of the head to save his pretty face.26 As he raised the weapon to fire the shot which would take his life, his hand slipped and the shot cut his spinal cord instead of blowing his brains out--a final blow of the ill-fortune that had plagued all of his endeavors against Lincoln since January 1865.
The point of this study is just this: that it was absolutely possible for Booth to have shot himself in the manner we describe. Did he? No one knows. Did Corbett shoot Booth as he maintained? No one knows. And there the story must remain. The witnesses saw nothing; but everyone heard the shot. Historians and commentators may believe whatever they choose, but no one can prove anything except Booth died from a bullet through the cervical spine that produced paralysis, and, ultimately, his death.
Notes:
4. H. Donald Winkler, Lincoln and Booth: More Light on the Conspiracy (Cumberland House, 2003), 189-93.
5. Ingraham, Prentiss (ed.), “Pursuit and Death of John Wilkes Booth,” The Century Magazine, cited in Steven G. Miller, “Death of an Assassin: Homicide, Suicide, or Something Else,” in Lincoln-Assassinztion.com, splash page. The full citation is: The Century Magazine, 39 (No. 3, January 1890), 443-49, with Booth’s desire not to be taken alive and Confederate Lt. M.B. Ruggles’ belief that Booth killed himself rather than be captured on 446.
6. William L. Reuter, The King Can Do No Wrong, 47, 53-55.
7. Quoted in Steven G. Miller, “Death of an Assassin: Homicide, Suicide, or Something Else,”. Miller has looked at approximately 55 accounts of the shooting at Garrett’s farm and finds Paraday’s story to be the only independently and marginally reliable (in our estimation, not Miller’s) one beyond Corbett’s own self-serving tale. Miller to Richter, November 26, 2011, e-mail in the author’s file.
8. Reuter, The King Can Do No Wrong, 46-51.
9. Robert A. Fowler, “Album of the Lincoln Murder: Illustrating How It Was Planned, Committed, and Avenged,” Civil War Times Illustrated, 4 (No 4, July 1965), 49.
10. Besides Winkler’s treatment, this is a main thesis of Joseph E. “Rick” Smith and William L. Richter, In the Shadows of the Lincoln Assassination: The Life of Confederate Spy Thomas H. Harbin (Laurel, Md.: Burgundy, 2007), 119-40. See also, Kate H. Mason, “A True Story of the Capture and Death of John Wilkes Booth,” Northern Neck Historical Magazine, 13 (December 1963), 127-39, and J. Sydnor Massey, “Chapter in the Death Chase of John Wilkes Booth,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 12, 1905, reprinted in Lincoln Assassination Discussion, General Category, All Things Lincoln Assassination, Enoch Mason’s Story of the Last Days of Booth”.
11. Dr. Blaine V. Houmes and Steven G. Miller, “The Death of John Wilkes Booth: Suicide by Cop?” American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 25 (No. 2, 2004), 25-36. See also, Miller’s most recent effort in this matter, “Death of an Assassin: Homicide, Suicide, or Something Else,” and Miller (ed.), a modernization of James O. Hall, “A Case of Mistaken Identity,” in Occasional Papers, 1 (no. 1, November 2011), 35-48.
12. James L. Swanson, Manhunt: The 12-day Hunt for Lincoln’s Killer (Harper Perennial, 2006), 330-31. Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Realism in the Old South (Louisiana State University Press, 1967), explains the Southern propensity to romantic callings. For Booth’s tendency in this direction, see his letters to T. William O’Laughen in John Rhodehammel and Louise Taper (eds.), “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me”: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth (University of Illinois Press, 1997), 35-44, especially 37-39.
13. Osterweis, Romanticism and Realism, 3-57. Booth’s challenge to the Federal soldiers is straight out of the Old South and the Code Duello. See, e.g., Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2000), Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford University Press, 1982), and Elliott J. Gorn, “Gouge, Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review, 90 (1985), 18-43.
14. Rhodehammel and Taper (eds.), The Writings of John Wilkes Booth, 155.
15. John K. Lattimer, Kennedy and Lincoln: Medical and Ballistic Comparisons of Their Assassinations (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), 61-84.
16. Ibid., 79.
17. On Booth’s familiarity and skill with revolvers, see testimony of Benjamin Barker, War Department Records, Judge Advocate General, National Archives and Records center as excerpted in David Rankin Barbee papers, folder 216, box 4, Georgetown University.
18. Lattimer, Kennedy and Lincoln, 78-83.
19. See John F. May, "The Mark of the Scalpel," Records of the Columbia Historical Society, 13 (1910), 49-68.
20. David Miller DeWitt, Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Macmillan, 1909), 90.
21. Lattimer, Kennedy and Lincoln, 75.
22. Ibid., 69-70.
23. See also, the autopsy report of Surgeon General J. K. Barnes, in Laurie Verge (ed.), The Body in the Barn: The Controversy Over the Death of John Wilkes Booth (The Surratt Society, 1993). 67-68.
24. Ingraham, Prentiss (ed.), “Pursuit and Death of John Wilkes Booth [Ruggles’ story],” 446; Larry Starkey, Wilkes Booth Came to Washington (Random House, 1976), 146-49, especially 147.
25. The best narrative of what happened at Garrett’s Farm is Jeannine Clarke Dodels, “The Last days of John Wilkes Booth at the Garrett Farm”. See also, Otto Eisenschiml, "Who Shot Booth?" in O. E.: Historian Without an Armchair (Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 159-66. Eisenschiml’s theory has gone “viral” since its inception; see Fowler, Robert H. "Was Stanton behind Lincoln's Murder?" Civil War Times, 3 (Aug. 1961), 4-13, 16-23; and David Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier, Jr., The Lincoln Conspiracy (Schick Sunn Classic Productions, 1977).
26. Lattimer, Kennedy and Lincoln, 75.
Rick Stelnick - Rick Stelnick is a superannuated political scientist, crime historian and historical detective.
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