The Secrets of John Wilkes Booth

The Problems with Proving a Conspiracy

• In her book, This One Mad Act, by Izola Forrester, makes the convincing claim that Booth had a daughter, by an actress from Richmond, Izola D’Arcy Mills.

• This daughter was her mother, Ogarita Booth, who was taken under the wings of Booth’s theatrical friends and spent her life touring as an actress

Ogarita Booth

The romantic and exotic nature of her name, taken from an “old play,” meaning Sea of Ice, as typical a Booth family gesture as could be found.

• Other convincing evidence:

• Ogarita’s resemblance to Booth is remarkable

• Ogarita had Booth family heirlooms that were passed to her daughter

• The family paid yearly visits to Booth’s older sister Rosalie after the war.

• Unfortunately, if one believes Ogarita to be Booth’s daughter (as she herself firmly believed)

• One must also believe Forrester’s story (for which there is less evidence) that Booth escaped, with the aid of the Knights of the Golden Circle

• Knights of the Golden Circle was a secret organization that could pass through the lines from Confederate to Union camps.

• It was comprised of and worked through Copperheads, Confederate Secret Service, cotton speculators, blockade runners, and irregular guerrilla forces. Large sums of money changed hands.

• Booth had been a member since his early days, since it was formed in the South out of remnants of the secretive Know Nothing Party.

• Historical dogma is against this story (and hence against any family connection between Ogarita and Booth)

• Does that mean it isn’t true?

• Can evidence be falsified? For example:– Those who identified his body were pressured

to do so– And exactly why members of the immediate

Booth family, to this day, oppose exhumation and DNA testing.

Other notable facts

• 1873: This photograph is taken of John Byron Wilkes of India in Philadelphia

Notable facts (continued)

• 1883: A will, written by John Byron Wilkes, on his impending death, left a sizeable sum to his family through Izola D’Arcy, including the son that was conceived after John Wilkes Booth was pronounced dead and buried (though he does not call him a natural heir)– Other children remembered in the will are those

of Kate Scott and Lola Henry

• 1883: John Byron Wilkes dies in Bombay and is buried.

• Difficulties in probating the will begin• There is another John Byron Wilkes living in

Terre Haute (whose identity JWB appropriated when he left the country)

• 1887: Andrew Potter hired by Sen. Lew Wallace (former Civil War General) for a generous sum to investigate the will, the possibility to JWB and JBW are the same, and to move the will through probate if possible, as heirs and their relatives were constituents of his.

• Mrs. John Byron Wilkes has moved to Indiana and needs money.

• 1890: John Stevenson dies in a boarding house after having dictated his memoir to Lottie Eaton, a young lady living there after her parents had died. She promised not to reveal the contents till after his death. His story was that he was one of the Booth conspirators, Michael O’Laughlin, who was said to have died in prison. He had been released by the KGC conspirators, given a new identity, and charged with moving Booth’s wife Izola and the Confederate gold hidden at his farm to California.– Thus in the winter of 1867-68 we have Stevenson and Izola

meeting Booth in San Francisco (where his older brother had a successful theater)

– Izola sailed away with him, and Stevenson bought a business– Pirates captured the ship and killed Booth (again); Izola,

suffering from PTSD becomes a shadow of her former self; Stevenson goes bankrupt and takes Izola home, where he second child is born. He marries her but never lives with her.

• 1896: Potter and Wallace succeed in probating the will. Ogarita, however, has died in 1982.

• And Potter, in the back of his mind, is wondering why on earth Wallace is paying all this money to shell out money to the widow (Wilkes’ new wife) and heirs of the man who shot the President.

• And we wonder the same thing. Unfortunately, we don’t have most of Potter’s papers, and many historians claim that the papers we do have don’t really exist (fake, forgeries, ungenuine history)

• 1910: Kate M. Scott, who along with her daughter and his heir, is also remembered in Wilke’s will, records her statement of her relationship with Booth. She knows him in Washington during the war, when she is an Army nurse. He gets her pregnant, then leaves. She sees him again after the assassination, clean shaven. He has sent her a note signed “John Byron Wilkes.” Although the daughter is not told the “circumstances of her birth,” it is mostly Kate’s efforts that have got the will probated.

• You are free to judge for yourselves…