Mummy

Last week in Chicago six physicians, including Health Commissioner Herman Bundesen and Dr. Edward Miloslavich, Milwaukee pathologist, gathered in the offices of Dr. Orlando Scott to examine the mummified remains of one John St. Helen. They thumped it, felt it. x-rayed it. Then they gravely nodded their heads and all but announced that the mummy was none other than that of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Lincoln.

On April 26, 1865, twelve days after the Ford's Theatre tragedy, a dying man was taken from a burning barn near Fredericksburg, Va. by U. S. troopers who believed they had captured and killed Booth. The body, removed to Washington, was hastily identified as Booth's and secretly buried in the Arsenal Grounds. Four years later it was exhumed, removed to Baltimore, again identified by friends and reburied in the Booth lot in Greenmount Cemetery.

At the end of the last century an itinerant house painter named John St. Helen appeared in the Southwest. When drunk, he would confess that he was Booth, that U. S. troopers had got the wrong man in Virginia, that he had escaped to Mexico. When sober, he would deny the whole yarn. There was just enough doubt about the identification of Booth's body to make St. Helen's story sound plausible. In 1903 at Enid, Okla., he committed suicide with arsenic. Finis Bates who later became Attorney General of Tennessee, believed his story, had his body embalmed, exhibited the mummy at circus sideshows about the land as Lincoln's killer. A Chicago woman bought it for $8,000, submitted it to physicians for examination and identification.

The doctors found:

The mummy had a broken leg. Booth broke his leg leaping from the Lincoln box.

Its right thumb was distorted. Booth as a boy had his right hand crushed in a scenery windlass in a theatre.

Across one eyebrow ran a scar. Booth's eyebrow was scarred as the result of a false thrust in a stage duel.

And in the mummy's stomach lay a ring marked "B."

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