It was reported that John Wilkes Booth, the killer of Abraham Lincoln, was shot dead in a barn near Port Royal.
But perhaps this story should be questioned, perhaps it is not true at all
In 1872, seven years after Booth was supposedly killed, Finis L. Bates met a man who called himself John St. Helen.
After befriending and gaining the confidence of this man Bates came into knowledge which would completely contradict all previous facts about one of most famous assassinations in history.
For John St. Helen was not a simple shopkeeper living in Texas, instead he was the actor turned assassin John Wilkes Booth.
Bates traveled the breadth of the country gaining evidence to support his argument that Booth did not die in a barn, but instead many years later.
He built a picture of Booth s life, questioning those who knew him before and after the event to demonstrate that St. Helen and Booth were the same man.
Published forty-two years after the murder of Lincoln and four years after St. John s death, The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth is a fascinating account of what was possibly the greatest deception in history,
Finis L. Bates was a Memphis, Tennessee, lawyer and author of The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth. This book was published in 1907 and Bates died in 1923.