Did John Wilkes Booth Die 38 Years After History Says? -- Pathologists Want To Find Out If Lincoln's Killer Is Really In His Grave

MEMPHIS - Like a good ghost story, the mystery of the Memphis-Oklahoma mummy gets better with every telling.

It comes with subplots that include murder, conspiracy, cover-up, escape, suicide, mummification, carnival freakiness, shady history, and, in the latest turn of events, the opening of a famous grave to get at the truth.

This is the continuing tale of the mummy that spent some 20 years in a Memphis garage while attorney Finis Bates worked to convince everyone that it was the remains of the man who shot Abraham Lincoln.

Although most historians have scoffed at the idea for more than 125 years, a team of forensic scientists soon may get a chance to exhume the body buried in one of the nation's most historic graves to learn, once and for all, if those are the bones of assassin/actor John Wilkes Booth.

Dr. Hugh Berryman, of the Regional Forensic Center here, said he and two other staff pathologists are prepared to open Booth's presumed grave as soon as the court approves a request to examine the body now buried in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery. Using high-tech methods, Berryman is sure he and his associates can tell if it's Booth.

ATTORNEY SAID BOOTH DIED IN 1903

If not, then it would lend credibility to the theory that Booth escaped, took a wife in Tennessee, lived secretly in Texas and finally died in 1903 in Enid, Okla. It was there Memphis attorney Bates went to identify the body and later claimed it after it had been mummified and put on display.

Bates was so convinced this is what happened that he wrote a book about it -"The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, or the First True Account of Lincoln's Assassination."

"Unfortunately, it's a lousy book, full of purple prose that makes you sick," says Dr. Arthur Ben Chitty, 77, historiographer for the University of the South at Sewanee. Despite its lack of literary merit, Chitty believes the book is accurate regarding Booth's escape.

As Bates told it, he first met the man who claimed to be Booth in Texas in 1877. Twenty-six years later, in 1903, Bates, who'd since moved to Memphis, was notified that the man had taken poison and died in a hotel in Enid, after saying he was Lincoln's assassin. As his lawyer, Bates was called to identify the body. And the more he heard, the more he became convinced this was truly Booth.

Oklahomans didn't know what to think. But they weren't taking any chances. The body was embalmed and townspeople waited in vain for the family or someone in authority to claim it. For eight years, the mummy remained at the funeral home where it gathered dust and the stuff of legend.

In the end, Bates, who published his book in 1907, claimed the body and brought it to Memphis. He stored it in a box in his garage, and there it remained until his death in 1923.

Bates' wife apparently sold the mummy to a

carnival for $1,000 and that started its second life in show business.

When Memphis forensic scientists became interested in the case, Berryman and his associates went looking for the mummy.

"We traced it to Pennsylvania and that's where we lost it," said Berryman, who had hoped to run tests on the leather-skinned corpse to see if it could have been Booth. But since the mummy has vanished, that leaves the body buried in Booth's grave in Baltimore.

Although a petition to exhume the remains is in the works, it's not that simple. Green Mount Cemetery officials don't want the grave disturbed. They are supported by historians who agree with the standard story - that Booth was killed in a Virginia barn 12 days after he shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865.

Supposedly, the body was identified first at Garrett's Farm, where Booth allegedly died, and again in Washington where he was originally buried. Four years later, another identification was made when President Andrew Johnson allowed the Booth family to rebury their kin in Baltimore.

However, people like Nathaniel Orlowek of Silver Spring, Md., and Chitty doubt the remains are Booth's. Chitty thinks the man in Booth's grave was someone who wandered into the barn after finding Booth's papers and diary on the road. When he was killed, he became part of a government cover-up that involved the secretary of war and the first chief of the Secret Service.

Chitty and Orlowek believe historians haven't seen the evidence they've been gathering over the years. Orlowek, alone, has turned up enough evidence to persuade TV's "Unsolved Mysteries" to do two segments on the mystery during the past 13 months.

NO EXHUMATION LIKELY UNTIL SPRING

Orlowek and Chitty have enlisted a lawyer to help them open the grave and exhume the body "in the public interest." Although Orlowek said he is hopeful the exhumation will be approved in the next month, it's doubtful any digging will be done until spring.

Whatever happens, it's unlikely that it will be as sensational as the reburial in 1869 of the man believed to be Booth.

Years later, Burke Davis, a historical writer for the Evening Sun, described the scene that followed President Johnson's decision to allow the Booth family to transfer the body from Washington to the family plot in Green Mount.

News of the reburial became public and people jammed the funeral home, Davis wrote. Then, men and women "passed among them the head of the assassin, which had been severed from his body. In Baltimore, there was no doubt of his identity."