are now housed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in the National Museum of Health and Medicine—although they are not on public display. Dr. Barnes then turned his completed autopsy over to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who also took control of the photographs made of the corpse, and of Booth’s diary, which was handed to him by Lafayette C. Baker.
Curiously, the photographs soon disappeared. And when Baker was later called upon to verify that Booth’s diary actually belonged to the killer, he was astonished to see that “eighteen leaves,” or pages, had been cut from the journal—allegedly by Secretary Stanton. Neither the photographs nor the missing pages have ever been found, casting more suspicion on Stanton’s possible role in a conspiracy.
The secretary of war wished the Booth situation to be handled with as little public outcry as possible, and this meant forbidding a public funeral. On Stanton’s orders, Lafayette Baker staged a mock burial, wrapping the body in a horse blanket and publicly hurling it into the Potomac. However, this was just a ruse to conceal the body’s actual location. After the crowd on shore watched Baker dump a weighted object into the river, the ship traveled around a bend to the site of the old penitentiary, on the grounds of the Washington Arsenal. The assassin was buried in an anonymous grave beneath the prison’s dirt floor, his body concealed inside the gun box that served as his casket. When, two years later, the penitentiary was shuttered and leveled, Booth’s remains were moved to the family plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, where they remain to this day.
Despite all evidence that Booth is actually dead and was buried in the grave bearing his name, various legends have maintained that he escaped into the South and lived a long life. In December 2010, Booth’s descendants agreed to exhume the remains of Edwin Booth to see if DNA from his body is a match for the DNA in the vertebrae housed at Walter Reed. As the chief historian for the Navy Medical Department noted, “If it compares favorably, then that’s the end of the controversy. If it doesn’t match, you change American history.” As of this writing, the outcome of that investigation is still pending.
Mary Lincoln never recovered from Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. She insisted on wearing only the color black for the rest of her life. Mary lingered in the White House for several weeks after the shooting, then returned home to Illinois, where she spent her time answering the many letters of condolence she had received from around the world, and also lobbying Congress for a pension. This was granted in 1870, for the sum of $3,000 per year. However, just when it appeared that Mary was recovering from her considerable grief, in 1871 her eighteen-year-old son, Tad, died of a mysterious heart condition. This brought on a downward spiral of mental instability, dramatized in spending sprees, paranoia, and delusions—once she almost jumped out of a building after wrongly believing she saw flames consuming the structure. Her only remaining son, Robert, had her committed to a mental institution in 1875. She spent a year there, during which she engaged in a letter-writing campaign to the Chicago Tribune that so embarrassed Robert he had her released. Mary moved to the south of France for four years, living in exile in the town of Pau before returning to Springfield. She died in 1882, at the age of sixty-three. She is buried alongside her husband.
Robert Todd Lincoln went on to a stellar career as an attorney and then public official. He served as secretary of war from 1881 to 1885, during the James Garfield and Chester Arthur administrations, and served as U.S. minister to Great Britain from 1889 to 1893, under Benjamin Harrison. Although he was not present at Ford’s Theatre when his father was assassinated, he was an eyewitness to Garfield’s assassination in 1881 and nearby when President William McKinley was assassinated, in 1901.
John Wilkes Booth would have been enraged to know that Robert Lincoln and Lucy Lambert Hale spent the afternoon of Lincoln’s assassination together, studying Spanish. It’s possible that Lucy could have mentioned this upcoming appointment to the assassin during their final moments together that morning, fueling his jealousy. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because Lucy Lambert Hale will forever be linked with John Wilkes Booth.
Secretary Stanton, out of respect for her father’s position, refused to let her be called upon to testify at the trial. However, there