Blanche Booth, niece of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, broke the 60-year silence of the Booth family in February of 1925. In an interview given exclusively to the Minneapolis Daily Star and the International News Service, Ms. Booth revealed that her infamous uncle had escaped pursuing federals, made it to Canada, and then to Mexico. From there, according to the tarnished actor’s niece, Booth met his mother, a year later, in San Francisco. There he told her “all about the plot, its execution, and his carefully planned escape.”
This news was syndicated and carried by, among others, the Waterloo Evening Courier newspaper, of Waterloo, Iowa. (“Lincoln Assassin Not Killed; Niece Bares Old Secret”, Page 3, February 23, 1925) The Waterloo newspaper added its own adjunct which included information about one Edwin Harper Sampson. He had been one of a group of seven men who had disposed of “Booth’s body.” Sampson had recently died in Moline, Illinois, keeping his lips sealed. Blanche Booth reportedly believed that Sampson knew it was not John Wilkes Booth who had been killed at the Garrett farm. It was, instead, a man named Ruddy who had been killed.
The adjunct in the Waterloo Evening Courier also told of a Colonel James Hamilton Davidson, by then blind and residing in Chicago. Colonel Davidson had inside knowledge of the “Booth burial” project headed by Colonel Lafayette Baker of the Union army secret service. According to Colonel Davidson, whoever it was who was killed at the Garrett farm had had acid poured over his remains at the secret burial. (Acid had also been poured upon the remains of Leon Czolgosz, whose handkerchief emitted gun sounds in the vicinity of President William McKinley in 1901.)
Blanche Booth confirmed that her uncle had finally died at Enid, Oklahoma in 1903. She said John Wilkes Booth had committed suicide. In this she slightly differs with J. Frank Dalton, who had surfaced in Lawton, Oklahoma in 1948 claiming to be Jesse James. “Old Jesse” told his grandson, Jesse Lee James III, that pursuing Yankees had been chasing a “feather in the wind” when they hunted the trail of John Wilkes Booth immediately following the murder of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Booth was not killed at Garrett’s farm; instead it was “some poor soul, a crippled, homeless old veteran…” Booth eventually settled down in Texas, for many years. The vainglorious actor “had taken the same bloody oath we had,” confided old Jesse to his grandson. When Booth began collaborating on a book with Finis Bates, he was breaking the oath of Omerta. For this he had to die. And so, J. Frank Dalton differed somewhat in his narration from Blanche Booth. John Wilkes Booth had been poisoned, in Enid, Oklahoma. But it had not been a suicide. (Source: Jesse James and the Lost Cause, by Jesse Lee James III. New York: Pageant Press, 1961)
As of February 1925, Judge Elbert H. Gary, president of U.S. Steel, was “devoting his spare time to hounding down the mystery that has surrounded Booth’s death,” Blanche Booth told reporters. (Waterloo Evening Courier, op. cit.)
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