Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: A Shot in the Dark- Investigating Lincoln's Assassination and the Chilling Conspiracy

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

In this episode of Body Bags, hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the assassination and autopsy of President Abraham Lincoln.  They analyze the character and motivations of John Wilkes Booth, the layout of Ford's Theater, and the negligent behavior of John Parker, assigned to protect the president. They provide a fascinating explanation of the Philadelphia Deringer's firing mechanism, including its unique preloading process and firing sequence as well as going into Booth's meticulous planning, highlighting his knowledge of the play's comedic timing, Lincoln's potential focus on the orchestra pit, and the painstaking preparation involved in using the Deringer. Throughout this captivating episode, listeners uncover the chilling details and lasting impact of one of the most infamous moments in American history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I've been to two locations over the course of my life where presidential assassinations took place. I've got to say, I was left surprised by both. I don't know how this kind of figures into the calculus, if you will, or what my expectation was. I went to Dallas and stood just adjacent to what they term as the sniper's nest on Dealey Plaza in the Texas school book depository there. Looked out that window and I could see the road stretching on before me. And what really kind of stood out to me, having watched newsreels for years and years relative to

the Kennedy assassination I always imagined that area was going to be really really big massive it wasn't it was kind of condensed if you will I actually went down and when traffic wasn't approaching me I went out stood on the X where they claimed that the fatal shot was sustained. But it seemed small. However, I went to Ford's Theater as well. Other than, you know, the building being very, very old and probably having one of the best museums I've ever been in, period, down in the basement,

the space of Ford's theater was so much larger than I expected and as I stood there and I looked and of course it's not necessarily configured like it was at that time they had to do a lot of restorative work and repairs and all sorts of things but the approximations of where everything is you can only imagine that as a single shot rings out and the sound of maybe ripping bunting as a spur is caught in it and John Wilkes Booth falls to the stage below, it would echo in that space. Everybody frozen in time. It's hard to take the measure when great men fall.

But today, we're going to talk about the assassination and autopsy of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave Mack, my friend, senior crime reporter with Crime Online. When I proposed this to you, I don't know if you thought that I was out of my mind or if you thought that, wow, this is going to be really intriguing. I was fascinated by the prospect. That's why I wanted to do this. I've always been interested in exactly what was found relative to Abe Lincoln and his mortal remains. How did they go about assessing what had happened? And so much has been written about

Lincoln. I think that probably out of every president, there's been more books written than any other president we've ever had. And they still continue to be written today. But, you know, when you get down to it, he was a man. He was a man that died at the hand of another man. And he was felt like so many other people have died in our country at the end of the muzzle of a weapon. I just wanted to explore that. Were you kind of surprised when I pitched this to you? My first thought when you suggested doing it, I thought, okay, I know nothing. I mean, other than the shot from John Wilkes Booth, I am totally ignorant of his death and what took place in those hours between the time he was shot and the time he died. I know plenty of rumors, I guess, or theories of things that happened,

because no matter what happens when you talk about Abraham Lincoln and the assassination, there are so many rabbit holes to take a tour of from conspiracy theories to know what really happened, which, by the way, was a conspiracy. I remember mentioning this one day on my radio show saying, you know, we'll talk about the conspiracy surrounding the assassination of President Lincoln. And I had people that were mad. They thought I was just muddying the water that, you know, I was shocked that people don't know what really happened. Okay. So when you mentioned covering it, I thought, okay, this is one big part of the story that most of us don't know and cannot understand. What really happened when President Lincoln was shot in a public place

at night with an audience by an actor? I mean, there's a lot going on in that moment. You're a scholar, you're a forensic genius. You are all of these things. And I'm going to be honest. I'm waiting to hear what really happened, the truth of what took place, medically speaking, with President Lincoln. Well, it's shocking to me. I guess I'm taking this in measure compared to the way we see things now. I've been to presidential inaugurations. I've been in the presence of presidents. I almost got T-boned one day in downtown Atlanta many years ago by Al Gore's detail that were

blowing red lights going to CNN. And I was actually returning from a death scene. I just worked. And I was down by CNN Center. And I could hear sirens, but I wasn't expected because in downtown Atlanta, you don't expect to see people driving like really, really fast on the streets. First off, the streets are horrible. They're real bumpy and uneven. Not in that case. And there before me flew the motorcade of Al Gore when he was vice president.

That's a vice president. I think that the thing that many people ask or many people have questions about when it comes to President Lincoln is access and opportunity. Abraham Lincoln was known for his kind of folksy way. And back during those times, just measure this by what happens today, Dave. If an individual wanted to come and see the president at the White House, all they merely had to do was, it was referred to as presenting your card. And you would knock on the front door of the White House. You would show up the door would be answered by servant and you would hand your card like a business card over to the person that greeted you at the door and they would announce you now you

might not get to see the president it stated that there were people be standing around milling about waiting but there were people that got in to see him there were really no appointments that were needed. You could just take your shot, no pun intended, and see him. And of course, that night at Ford's Theater, I think one of the lingering questions guarding the president and what happened that night, lo these many years, how did Booth get access to the president, to his box? And it's one thing to stand outside of the president's box, because let me kind of paint the picture for you. And having been there, if you're in Ford's Theater,

and I know I'm going to say this wrong to all the people that have theater background, so forgive me in advance, but if you're standing center stage, if you will, in the audience, there's an orchestra pit right at the forward portion in front of the stage. They kind of sit down and the stage itself is pitched, which I was struck by. The stage itself gradually rises from the front to the rear. And then it comes to this big crescendo where you can see that there is a tremendous elevation change it's not like it is today the stage is completely different from the way they have it reassembled down there i was struck by that but up to your right in ford's theater there is a president what's a what they called a box up there.

It was the presidential box. And it's still festooned today. They have bunting, red, white, and blue bunting that's up there. And there's a portrait of President Washington hanging on the front of it. They had prepped it that way that night knowing, and this is the key, knowing that the president was going to come. It was actually announced that he was going to be there. You know, Joe, I actually found out they had flyers printed up announcing that he would be there and what time he would be there. This is fascinating because this is only four days after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. And people have described those times, if you can imagine, coming through this tremendous darkness.

And it is a darkness that none of us can comprehend i don't think of that war in the movie lincoln spielberg's lincoln character of lincoln is played by daniel day lewis and he he makes the comment describing describing the civil war is i want to put an end to this pestilential war i love that term it It just encompasses everything. Can you imagine all of a sudden you get this news, they didn't, all they had were telegraph and horseback. Suddenly the clouds began to lift. Everybody's in a celebratory mood. And even reports from the audience that night said that there was a sense of levity in the audience that people, it was like, it was celebratory and people were very, I don't even know if happy is an insufficient term, relief, I think.

Oddly though, even at that time, Lee had surrendered to Grant four days earlier, but Tennessee was still fighting. Yeah, there were still battles going on. I don't know that the surrender in North Carolina, which followed the surrender at Appomattox, had taken place even to this point. And still out west, you had skirmishes going on out in Texas. So, it hadn't actually come to an end. Things moved a lot slower back then than they do now. Going back even decades prior to this, the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 was actually fought after the end of

hostilities. So, that's kind of an interesting, it gives you an idea of how slow things moved, and they didn't have telegraph then, but it was a different pace. And with that different pace, you didn't have the rigor that you have now when it comes to presidential security. Well, you mentioned somebody being able to walk up to the White House, knock on the door and present your card and have access to the White House and possibly the president. So at Ford's Theater, where he's in the presidential box, where everybody's been told he's going to be, it was not necessarily guarded. It has been said that it was essentially unguarded. And probably one of the most infamous

characters in this whole tragedy was this fellow John Parker, who was actually one of the original members of the first established police force for D.C., what we now know as D.C. Police. He was actually one of the first members that were hired. And I mean, we'll break it down. He was a drunk. He had been reprimanded multiple times, had been brought before board over and over and over again, and had never been terminated from employment. Out of all of the people in the world, he was actually assigned to protect the president. Now, this is before the days where you had a Secret Service presence taking care of everything. These guys that work with Secret Service now, they do advanced planning so far out that I think a lot of people would be shocked to know everything that goes into that protection detail.

And back then, you know, when the Secret Service was initially established, it had nothing to do with presidential security. That's something that they inherited years later. There would be two more presidents assassinated after Lincoln before it kind of clicked with them that, hey, you probably need a full-time detail. And back then, they were known to do counterfeit investigation. This John Parker character was assigned to Lincoln, and he would be found sleeping on duty many times. He liked to, as the older generation used to say, he liked to pull the cork. And even that night, after everyone got settled in the box up to the right aspect or to the right of the stage there was a chair for him out there that he would he would be seated in and you got kind of two doors that you have to walk through in order to get access to the

actual box he would not have seen inside of the box once he was stationed there. It was at some point in time he was seen going down, leaving, chatting with the carriage driver for the president and Mrs. Lincoln, then adjourning over to a bar that was called The Star. And I've seen it. It's immediately adjacent as you're facing Ford's Theater. It's to the right. And he began pulling a cork over there during this period of time when the play was going on, re-enters the theater, they believe, and finds himself a choice seat down in the audience so that he can enjoy the play. So the president is completely unguarded. Then enters John Wilkes Booth. His day, he would have been, I guess, from a movie star perspective, he's Ben Affleck or Matt Damon.

A Baldwin brother. Because of his brother Edwin being an actor. Hey, you know, you're absolutely right. And their dad, Julius, you know, had immigrated from Great Britain. Very well known. I mean, this was a had immigrated from Great Britain. Very well known. I mean, this was a theater family. They were known and he was known. He was regarded as very handsome, spent a lot of time at Ford's Theater, but he was

just full of vitriol when it came to the president. He blamed the president for everything. He supported, quote unquote, the Southern cause cause but never quite found the guts to go and sign up and stand a post and shoulder a weapon never could find that within himself to do but yet he planned several attempts i think at one point time he's going to try to kidnap the president and ransom him that plan had to be changed obviously for all kinds of reasons but you mentioned he didn't have the guts to shoulder a weapon. He didn't have the guts to man up and actually fight for what he claims he believes. But he did think by doing this, he would become a hero in the South,

which plays into what really happened after the fact. As a Southerner, I have to admit, I think that Lincoln was about bringing the country back together, healing. I think that this was the worst possible thing that could have ever have happened. He did damage to the South that would probably rival the damage that had actually occurred during the war. When the North had an opportunity to visit vengeance upon the South, boy, they did it, and they did it in spades, man. I mean, they just wrecked the South for years and years, and it was because of this act, this act of this person.

People were sick of war. They didn't want anything else to do with it. That night back in 1865 in that old theater, when John Wilkes Booth pulled that Philadelphia Derringer from his pocket, he pulled that hammer back and he let fly that round. He changed history. You think about things in minute detail, particularly when it comes to the assassination of a president. The mere action of placing the pad of your right index finger onto that smooth metallic surface of what otherwise would be known as a beautiful and elegant weapon. And engaging that trigger mechanism, that one motion, that one initiation, that one action, set in motion things that I don't know that we have ever recovered from dave

i think that what took place in the months leading up to the assassination from the summer of 1864 when john wilkes booth was gathering amongst him some people who felt the same way he did or at least leaned that way up until the point of the assassination. I think that whole planning stage and the execution that took place damaged our country. And there are places still felt to this day. I think Winston County, Alabama comes to mind. If you ever have a chance, and as long as we're talking history, there's a place called Looney's Tavern in Winston County. And at Looney's Tavern, the county decided to not be involved in the Civil War. And they decided they were going to be neutral.

Switzerland, right here in Winston County, Alabama. And to this day, because they remain neutral, if you go into Winston County, you can tell how the road changes from the minute you go into Winston County because they don't get support from the state of Alabama the way other counties do because they refused to be involved. That's how far out, I mean, it is 2023 and we're talking about something that happened in 1861, two, three, four and five. But anyway, I had a question for you because I'm not a gun expert, Joe. I don't know that much about what they do. I'm looking at everything surrounding the assassination and what John Wilkes Booth was going to use.

He couldn't walk into the theater carrying a rifle. It had to be a small gun. He knew as an actor, he would have access to areas within the theater that the regular patron might not. So he knows he can get up there, but he still has to have a weapon that will do what he needs it to do. But it has to be small enough that he can get in there with it. So what are we talking about with the gun that he used? It didn't have a magazine it only had one shot right yeah yeah it did it's quite a beautiful weapon when you see it and i've seen this weapon the weapon you remember i'd mentioned the the theater museum ford's theater it's in the basement and

look i recommend anybody if you're in dc go to ford's theater it's one of those places that you got to pay to get into you know there's a lot of stuff that's free in DC. That's the beauty of it if you're a history person. But Ford's Theater, you've got to pay. It's worth every dime you're going to spend. Trust me. This weapon, it looks like it's floating in the air when you see it. But it's pegged up there with a couple of really tiny little nails and hanging, suspended in the air.

And you can see it. And what's really kind of fascinating about it is that you can move around this thing and you can actually stare right down the muzzle of it i mean when i say stare down the muzzle you can stare down the muzzle so effectively that you can actually see the lands and grooves which are the twists that are built into this this barrel i think many folks believe that this is almost like an old-fashioned smoothbore musket. It's not. It was, back then, it was cutting-edge technology.

It's referred to as a Philadelphia Derringer. It had a walnut stock, has a walnut stock, and it's beautifully embossed. This style of weapon is something that people will refer to as a poker pistol, which is interesting. Also as a pocket pistol, a palm pistol, a belly gun. And it was meant, as you had stated, for concealment purposes. And the effective range on it is very limited. Very, very limited. Once you get outside of probably about 10 feet you might as well be throwing rocks

at that point in time but the reason this thing is referred to as a poker pistol is that the distance across a poker table that this thing would have been deployed in would be sufficient to the task if you were firing at somebody across the table. I don't know if they're cheating at cards or whatever the case might be. But here's what's interesting. When you look down the muzzle of this weapon, you remember I talked about lands and grooves. For its time, this particular weapon had a left-hand twist, which when you think about lands and grooves, which are those kind of spiraling marks that run down the length of the barrel to add stability to the round, it's kind of

like throwing a football. The reason really good football players are great, or quarterbacks that is, is if they can get a tight spiral on a ball, it maintains energy, okay? The bullet is spinning, the football is spinning, and it maintains, it holds on to what energy that it can, and it stays on target. Whereas if you fire something down a smooth bore, that projectile is kind of rattling down the barrel, if you will. And it has no kind of predictability to it. Now, there are parameters for this thing. First off, you have to consider the size of the round. You have to consider the amount of powder or propellant that would have been used.

What would it have looked like? Would it have been like a bullet like we know today? No. Or would it be a round ball? And where would the powder be? It's been known under several different calibers. And remember, when we say caliber we're talking about the diameter in inches around the circumference of of the round itself so

this is some people call it a 44 caliber some people call it a 45 caliber that is the philadelphia derringer it was a 44 caliber that means 0.44 inches in diameter. Okay. The muzzle of the weapon. Booth loaded this thing with a 0.41. So he didn't get the maximum power because as it's packed in there, as it's packed in there, and you have to use, if people have seen what a ramrod is, it's the attachment it looks like a rod that's generally held beneath the length of the barrel on a weapon that is what's referred to as a muzzle loader so you have to put the round down the barrel from the open end of the barrel and pack it down in there in order to get this thing to initiate. Well, he used a caliber of bullet, which was a 41 caliber.

The bullet is actually smaller. What you want is primarily you want a round that is going to be tightly fitted in there because that is going to take advantage of this muzzle of this blast of the propellant. As the firing sequence is initiated, you're going to transfer more energy, that's kinetic energy, to this round as it travels out of the end of this muzzle and gets to target. You have to preload this thing and have it loaded in your pocket. Generally, the hammer is forward and the hammer is the big mechanism. If you'll take a look at this thing online, again, it's elegant when you see it. The hammer mechanism is that thing that has to be driven forward by the trigger.

When you pull the trigger, the hammer slams forward and initiates the firing sequence. And there's a couple of components here. There is what's referred to as a nipple in the hammer housing, which has a little firing port on the top. So you have to take a percussion cap, which has got an explosive in it. It's brass. You set it on the nipple. Okay. And so when the hammer, when the trigger is pulled and the hammer slams forward, it sends this little spark down this little portal inside of the nipple and it travels down until it strikes, that spark strikes the actual propellant or powder inside of the muzzle that you've already pre-loaded. That explosion goes off and so

the bullet then travels out of the end of the barrel and heads toward the target. So pull the trigger now, for instance, on a semi-automatic weapon, you don't really get the sense of any kind of delay, even though there is in a millisecond when the firing pin strikes that primer cap that we have that's built into a bullet now or to live ammo. And that firing sequence all initiates inside the barrel, not with this. What would have happened is as Booth took this weapon out of his pocket, he would have had to have cocked the hammer externally. And it's really high.

It looks like it sits about one to two inches above the top level of the barrel, the backside of the barrel. He would have pulled it back and it would have clicked twice. You have a half cock and then you have a full cock. In order to fire it, you got to pull it all the way back. So it'd go click, click. Okay. He probably would have done this before he entered the area where Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln and Major Rathbone and his date were seated. He would have walked up to the back of Lincoln and pointed the thing at his head. And we can get into that in a moment. But when he initiated this firing sequence, Dave, you would have heard a click as the thing is fired.

And then you would have heard a small explosion. It would have been like that and then boom. So it's like poof, boom, like this. What happens is externally, that hammer slams forward on that primer cap, initiates a tiny explosion, and that tiny explosion initiates a bigger explosion, which is the propellant. And it drives that round out of the end of that barrel. Now, today, if you were to try to get an idea of the energy of this weapon, okay, in today's standards, it would be probably the equivalent of our highest powered air gun that we have. Wow. And the further away you are from target, the more diminished the power is.

So you have to be up close. And of course, Wilkes was close. He was probably within inches of Lincoln's head when he pulled that trigger and his whole firing sequence initiated. When that firing sequence initiated, the click, okay, squeezes the trigger and the beginning, it starts. Would there have been enough time for President Lincoln to react to hearing that click, the trigger is pulled, for him to react and begin to turn

before the bullet came out? That's the thing about this. I'm so glad you brought this up. As we've stated and everybody knows, John Wilkes Booth was an actor and he had been present for this play so many times. He knew some of the people that were in the play. And not only did he know that, he knew because it's a comedy. All right. He knew when laughter was going to rise and fall, and he timed it as a line is

delivered during the period of this play that elicits the loudest roar of laughter that can be experienced. According to what we know about the nature of the injury that President Lincoln sustained, he apparently was leaning forward, perhaps, okay, with his head kind of pitched downward, all right? And some people believe he wasn't looking at the stage, but he was probably looking in the orchestra pit, which is in front of the stage. Maybe some instrument caught his attention. When you're around an orchestra, and Lincoln would have been around a lot of music because

every time he walks in a room, somebody's going to play Hail to the Chief. There's still this fascination about a group of people getting together and playing instruments, and they're playing the soundtrack essentially for this play. Some people believe that he's looking down at the orchestra pit and this kind of dictates the orientation of his head relative to the firing line. But Booth knew enough about the play so that when laughter began to rise, he knew that his movements, the cocking of that weapon, and any comment he would make would be drowned out. He knew that anybody else that might be occupying that area up there, their attention would be drawn to the stage. And the idea is to get the eyes away from you,

if you're the assassin. And to a great degree, he had planned this perfectly in that sense. Didn't plan his escape very well, but he planned this to this point. He knew that this was the best time. So when he fired that round into the back of the president's head, he had one attempt to do it. Here's a fascinating thing about these Philadelphia Derringers, as they're referred to. You could buy them in pairs. And as a matter of fact, you could buy, I think, I think this is correct. You could actually buy a pair of these things for $24, which was a tremendous amount of money.

But Booth is very successful. Would have been considered in that day wealthy, probably. You could actually buy in pairs. And it stands to reason that you would want it because if one round was not effective, you've got a second or a fallback weapon to fire as well. Because these are not semi-automatic. It's a painstaking practice to have to go through and load it. And the way the loading actually took place is that you would measure out the number of grains that it would take, grains of propellant, which this is a black powder weapon.

So it's very messy, very, very messy. It's not like smokeless powder like we have today. You put the powder down into the barrel. So you have to lift the muzzle so it's pointed skyward. You pour the powder down in there. Okay. Then you put a cloth patch down on top of the powder. Then the ball, which is a ball, it's a ball of lead. All right. It's not the kind of conical shaped bullets that we have now that have points on them. Okay. You'd asked that earlier. This is actually a ball that is now rammed down in there

with this tiny little ramrod that's attached on the base of this Philadelphia Derringer. And the bullet is what's referred to as seated at that time. You get it tightly packed in there so that when you're walking up and you're walking up and down the streets or you're riding on horseback or whatever it is, bullet's not going to fall out. You have to have it tightly seated in there so that when you do use this thing and you cock it and you set that action in motion, you're guaranteed, first off, you're going to still have a round in there. It's not going to fall off in your pocket.

And then secondly, that it's tightly secured enough so that you're going to get maximum pressure when that explosion takes place. As we look at what has taken place, secured enough so that you're going to get maximum pressure when that explosion takes place. As we look at what has taken place, this is the part that, like millions of other people, I can't understand what happened next. We've got John Wilkes Booth in the theater where he obviously had access because people knew who he was. Now Booth standing there, he pulls the trigger. He shoots the president in the head and then proceeds to slash Major Rathbone and then leaps from the presidential booth to the stage. That's the story. And that Rathbone tried to grab his jacket, causing Booth to land awkwardly, possibly breaking his leg as he landed.

And then the hunt was on. Everybody else, as you mentioned, is there a surgeon in the house? The president has been shot in the head. They have to immediately get him out of where he is and get him into the care of doctors. I'm sure they just don't grab him up like a child and run out of there. No. When he was initially, when the first assessment was made by a surgeon that rolled into the box, he noted that the president was still seated in his chair, in the presidential chair, there in the booth. And he was leaning to his right.

So, the defect or where the injury is, is going to be on the left rear or posterior aspect of the president's skull. And Mary Todd Lincoln was kind of cradling him. He was leaning over on top of her. He's a big man, too. I mean, tallest president we've ever had. He's leaning over onto the first lady, and she's kind of diminutive. So you can see this giant of a man. She's cradling him.

I'm sure she's weeping.utive so you can see this giant of a man she's cradling she's i'm sure she's weeping she's hysterical at this point and the surgeon arrives and they know that he's i don't know that they know he's been mortally wounded as a matter of fact people saw people report hearing the report of a weapon many people pause because they thought that it was part of the play. Can you imagine that? And I think that it's much the same kind of response that we would have today. We're not automatically going to think that somebody has just been the victim of homicide right in front of us. We think if you're at an entertainment venue like this, you're going to think, oh, this is just part of the play. And somebody's down on the stage.

They leapt from a box very dramatically. And I think even Booth shouted out. Some people debate over what he said. Six Sempra Tyrannis, I think, which is the state motto of Virginia. Death to tyrants, I think. But you mentioned earlier that he knew the play. Yeah. He picked an actual part of the play where people might think it was part of the show.

So he knew what he was doing in terms of the potential getaway. So there's kind of this delay that occurs. It's reported that Mary Todd Lincoln screamed, and it's at that point it kind of jolted everybody. They realized that something truly horrible has happened. And you have people that are in attendance. A young surgeon had made his way up to the box. And when he was taking a look at President Lincoln, he's trying to assess, which is what surgeons do. That's what physicians do.

They're trying to assess a patient to try to understand, first off, if it's trauma-related, where is these insults to the body that we're looking for? At first, he saw blood on the shoulder. People did see the knife. You know, this Philadelphia pocket pistol is easily concealed. They heard what sounded like gunfire, but there was nothing to validate. But Booth's got this knife that actually looks like a big bowie knife. Gigantic hilt, lengthy blade. He's brandishing this thing. Rathbone has been cut at this point

from his shoulder down to his elbow, I think. He's been slashed. So the surgeon, his first inclination is to think, well, maybe this is a cut. Maybe the president has been slashed in some way. But then as he begins to kind of work his hand up to the president's hairline, he pulls it away and he notes that there's blood on the back of the skull or on the back of his head. And then he knows what he's dealing with. He's dealing with a gunshot wound, which is something he would not have been unfamiliar with. Remember, we're still in the midst of a war. Back then, and they didn't have x-rays. They didn't have MRIs. They didn't have any means of figuring out what kind of damage has been done.

We just, at this point, know that the president has been shot in the head. What do they do? Start poking? How do they know? Well, the first thing they do is they're using their bare hands, which, look, you can't fault these people for doing that. And I've got to tell you, I mean, if you've got somebody there and you don't have surgical gloves on, you're going to use your hands as well. But there's a higher, the bar is a bit higher for surgeons. Certainly today there are.

But, you know, the only way that you can kind of assess what's going on is that you're going to feel for a defect. And it would have been a circular defect that he would have sustained. And if folks that are listening, if you will find that bony protuberance on the back of your skull, it's kind of this bump on the back of it, okay? That's the occipital area. Some people call it the occiput. This injury is going to be three inches behind what they call the external auditory meatus, which is essentially your ear hole. So it's going to be to the rear of the left ear and slightly to the left

of the midline. So if you find the back of your skull, find the middle of it below the occiput, that bony protuberance, and go right there below that area on the back of your head, that's where the president's gunshot wound is. So, when it entered, it actually pushed through the cerebellum, which is that portion of the brain that sits at the base of the brain. It was tough to assess the track of the wound. And even today, you don't have immediate access to x-ray or be able to make some kind of diagnostic assessment. But the president, for a time at least, had stopped breathing and his pupils were dilated. He had either shallow respirations or no respirations at all. But guess what? When this initial responding surgeon places his hand adjacent, finds the defect, he pulls out a clot of blood, which had been creating pressure at that point in time.

And when he pulled out that clot of blood, Lincoln starts breathing again. So with that spark, with that moment, there's probably hope. Certainly, everybody else is not really going to know what's going on, but the surgeon says, okay, I've done this assessment. I've removed this clot of blood. You know what? Maybe there's a chance. The president is breathing.

Now, what do you do with him? Because we know that they had made the assessment, even up in that box, that that could not take him very far. He sustained a gunshot wound to the head they know that he's probably not going to be long for this world that we didn't have you didn't have escalates that drive smoothly down the road on paved roads the at best roads were cobblestone and in dc at that particular time, it was nothing to have dirt streets. And those would have wagon wheel ruts in them. So you take somebody that has got,

let's face it, probably one of the most serious head wounds that you can sustain, and you put them in the back of a buggy or the back of a wagon and try to convey them all the way back to the White House, which is some distance away. Down these bumpy roads, they probably wouldn't last one block. So they've got to get him somewhere. And the closest place is his boarding house. It's immediately across the street from Ford's Theater. And people have heard this tale before. But you have to be able to assess the president and his current status.

The bed that they found, Lincoln's a tall guy. They had to place him kind of, they say obliquely they use that term but it's kind of diagonally across bed so that he would he could fit on it and soon you've got all of these surgeons gathering at the house not to not not to mention any kind of other officials but here's the thing when you've got more than one physician in the room everybody's going to have a different opinion. And just think about the added pressure of having the president there. What they did know is that they were going to try to have to assess the location, as they refer to, the location of the ball.

We refer to them as projectiles now most of the time, but they refer to these as balls. And this goes all the way back to muzzleloading days of Revolutionary War and up to that day in particular, because it was a ball shape. It was a spherical lead ball that had been fired into the president's head. They had to try to determine the track of the wound. Where did it go? Where did it wind up? And they had this interesting kind of probe, which is fascinating. They didn't have x-ray. So what they would do is that they would insert this probe that had this kind of fin-like shape to it. And as you go into the track of the wound, there was a certain feel that this probe would

generate as it made contact with the metallic body in there. And this was disrupted a few times because as they're doing this assessment with this probe, they're encountering not the lead ball, but they're encountering fractured bits of skull. Because the ball itself cavitated through the area, but as it's passing through the external table of the skull it's creating other little satellite projectiles that are pointy they're jagged so they're tearing apart any any of the little vessels and there are many in the brain and you're creating this cavitated area that's filling up with blood they're trying to keep it drained because they do know, even at that primitive state that they were in, an understanding of how the brain functions,

the more pressure you have, intracranial pressure you have, the higher probability that you're going to lose a patient. So, they were trying their best to keep this clotted blood out, essentially draining that area as best they could. In that boarding house, he survived. He survived remarkably, I think roughly in the neighborhood of about eight hours. They didn't call it until 7.30 a.m. This had happened, I believe, shortly after 10 p.m. that night when he was shot. So the fact that they were able to help him survive that long is quite the feat. He couldn't, as the night went by, his breathing became progressively more labor. There was another moment in time where they were able to remove a clotted area of blood.

Again, his breathing picked back up. But at that point in time, you can't get in to this area. They don't have the ability. They don't have the technology and the tools to be able to perform surgery on the president. This is, in fact, a mortal wound. Backing up for just a second. Do they, at that time, take into account the muzzle velocity and this fact that it is just a ball as to how far it could traverse into his brain? And are they thinking, hey, we need to figure out a way to get that out of there? Probably.

This is the trouble. This is what the attendings were faced with at this moment, Tom. When they're attempting to do this assessment, Dave, they're sitting there and they're thinking, how in the world are we going to retrieve this round? And even if we retrieve the round, what does this mean for the president? What does this mean for his ability to survive? What does it mean for if he does survive, what his quality of life is going to be like? I think that they probably know the further that they try to go down this wound track, there's a higher probability they're going to compromise the brain's function. I think that they know that.

So these initial attempts to probe, I think, were hopeful attempts. Was he ever conscious? He was down. He was out the entirety. He never gained consciousness. I think that there are a couple of reports that he had begun to snore heavily at one point in time, which is something that is associated with a diminishment many times with patients that have sustained these fatal head traumas that are kind of lingering.

And all the while, you've got this other action that's going on. You know, I talked about the clotting that was taking place. But when they're assessing this wound on the back of his head, they noted that there was, they refer to as ecchymosis that was developing around the entry wound. Well, ecchymosis means that there's swelling. It has the appearance of a bruise. And they would have been able to appreciate this while trying to assess him through kind of the fog of the gunpowder residue, because there's going to be a tremendous amount of deposition. Just imagine something that is as black as asphalt. When you're talking about

black powder deposition on an area like this, it would have just been surrounding the wound, but they can see that there is developing hemorrhage back there. They know that, and this is just externally, they know that the capillary beds have been burst in this area. He's still breathing. His heart's still pumping, so he's bleeding out into this area. Swelling is occurring. Not only do you have swelling occurring externally that they can appreciate vis-a-vis the ecchymosis, but there's also intracranial pressures building up because of the swelling, the trauma that the brain has gone through. And the more it swells, the more it swells, the more diminished the capacity of the brain to function and more compromised it has become. Interestingly enough, I'd mentioned the wound

track. It clipped the top of the left aspect of the cerebellum and then kind of there's been questions over the years as to the exact track of the wound. And we'll get to that in just a second relative to the autopsy. But there is one thought that the track of the round went straight ahead toward the back of the left eye, okay? And that would have left it in the left hemisphere of the brain. Then there's another school of thought that it traversed from left to right. So if you put your hand back where I told you initially, your finger back there where the entrance wound would have been, you start there and then you go to the right orbit of your eye that the projectile would have lodged immediately behind the right eye. And it kind of traversed diagonally across the midline.

So you've got it crossing from the left hemisphere of the brain into the right hemisphere of the brain. We do know that the brain was greatly damaged in this event to the point where even at autopsy, they were having trouble assessing that. The president's body was removed from the boarding house. It was placed into a carriage. The body was given a Calvary escort. There's a bit of, I hate to use the word irony in this because that can be misunderstood, but it's fascinating to me that John Parker, the security guard, was absent that night. But as soon as the president was shot, they talked about the streets were filled, filled with men on horseback carrying sabers. You had tremendous security that showed up after the fact.

That's quite the tragedy. They actually had to use soldiers to keep people back from the boarding house. And it's easy to Monday morning quarterback, but why not beforehand? A lot of this could have been spared. That was just not in their way of thinking. And Lincoln was notorious for slipping away. He was not a pretentious person. They refer to him as rough hewn that he grew up in the wilderness and he truly did. You know, those areas that he occupied as a small boy, starting in Kentucky, going to Indiana and then winding up in Illinois.

That was a frontier, man. It was hard living. And it wasn't lace curtains and crystal chandeliers and all that sort of stuff in his world. He didn't like pretense, I don't think. And so he would dismiss security periodically. He would not want to be surrounded. He wanted to be with people. That was his nature. And so that night, his body was conveyed back to the White House, which is where the autopsy actually took place.

In one description, they talked about how the room in which his body was examined was sparsely decorated, which is kind of interesting given Mary Todd Lincoln's preoccupation with spending lots of money on redecorating the White House. There was even a congressional investigation into her expenditures. But they placed him on a slatted surface, wooden boards covered with sheets and cloths, essentially. And to do the examination, there were multiple physicians there. And who would actually do it, Joe? Would it be the surgeon that was on duty with him? You've got a couple of surgeons that were participating. You had doctors that studied disease, but you didn't actually have what

would be called a pathologist like we have nowadays. You had a guy that was a surgeon. For a long time, the term surgeon and physician were kind of interchangeable. You had one surgeon, Dr. Curtis, that was present for the autopsy and was actually conducting the autopsy. He's the person that removed the president's brain. How do you go about opening a head in this environment doing an autopsy? Well, you use it with a hand saw. You do it with a hand saw, and they had a very specific type of saw that they would have used. It had a small wooden handle on it. The teeth of the blade were more robust than, say, for instance, a hacksaw, but it is a saw, nonetheless, that would have had to have been used to do this. I've actually used a hand saw

to open a skull at autopsy, and it is laborious. We usually use a striker saw, which is, I've talked about before, which is this agitating saw where the blade moves back rapidly back and forth. And within just a couple of minutes, you can have what's referred to as the calvarium, which the calvarium is actually created. It's created, and some people call it the skull cap. You remove it after the incision in the bone is made with the saw. And once it's detached, it's referred to as the calvarium, which is essentially the roof of the skull, so that you can get access to the brain. The trick is, when you're opening a skull at autopsy, you have to make sure that the opening is sufficient to the size of the brain.

Because if you're trying to take it out, the brain can be described when you're touching it as having kind of a gelatinous texture to it. It's very fragile. And most brains are not immediately dissected. Many times when you dissect a brain, what will happen is you will set it aside and place it into a bucket of formalin, which formalin is a type of formaldehyde that's used in a medical context. The ideal thing is to let a brain sit up for about two weeks before you dissect it because you want it to be firm. And it takes that long a time to get it to that consistency. You have to make sure that the incision in the bone is sufficient to the task so that

that calvarium, when you take it off, is that defect that it's created by its absence is large enough so that you can get your fingers around the base of the brain into the floor of the skull. When they finally did get their hands inside of the skull. And these doctors would have been doing this barehanded, by the way, in case there was no such thing as a rubber glove at this point in time. So, everything is done since a touch. They're kind of feeling their way around. I would imagine that the room, they would have been very respectful. I've always wondered what kind of light source did they use? There is no electricity. So are they doing everything with some type of

lantern perhaps? Is there another person standing there with a lantern that's illuminating the area? Maybe the lantern has a mirror on it to take advantage of the reflected light and you're shining it onto this area. But a lot of the stuff is having to be done by touch. We look at it from the standpoint of what we have now and how we work and how we go about things. But for them, president of the United States of America would get the best care and post morning, he would get the best of the best at that time. So even when we talk about them using their bare hands, these are experienced individuals.

Yeah. These guys would have seen, Dave, I cannot emphasize to our listeners how much experience these people would have had. Even if you had not been on the battlefield, there was so much trauma. I don't know if any point in time in our history as a country, the medical sciences have been around this level of trauma that they had witnessed low these four to five years prior to this event where you had people's lives just blasted. Their bodies are just blasted apart and you're trying to do everything that you can to

save them. These guys would have been highly skilled for that day and highly skilled in the sense that there was a lot of stuff they were having to do blind. And of course, in our, you know, in our eyes, it was very barbaric. There were a lot of amputations back then and this sort of thing. And the person that was using the saw, Dave, this would not have been the first time that they'd had one of these saws in their hands. It goes back to the old adage that I think I've stated before, see one, do one, teach one, that gaining this experience through all of these cases being thrown at you. But when the attendings, and there were two, got their hands inside the skull, one thing that they were able to appreciate was the floor of the skull.

If you think about the area that's immediately adjacent, up and above, behind, up, up, and above, and behind your eyes, when the doctors got their hands into, you know, what I guess what you would refer to, some people use the term the cranial vault, you still, you're probing, trying to remove the brain carefully because the brain is greatly traumatized. Some people might use a term called macerated. It's really, really chewed up at this point as a result of this cavitating injury that's generated by this rather ample projectile. When you're trying to remove the brain, you're being very, very delicate. And even to this day, we try to be very delicate when we

take a brain out of the skull. You're having to trim away all of the connected vessels that are coming up into the base of the brain and also the optic nerves to try to cut them loose. But as they're running their hand on the underside of Lincoln's brain, they notice something. They feel something. They know that the floor of the skull, which directly above the eyes, is uneven. I have actually cut my finger on the floor of a skull before. When I'm running my hand trying to remove the brain, you can clip the latex on glove. The bone's very sharp. So, if you have these fractured areas, which Lincoln did, those bony prominences in there are very thin. I mean, they are eggshell thin. And the edges of those bones become very, very sharp.

So, as this bullet is traveling through there, you not only have the force of the projectile, the mass of that bullet traveling through this very delicate tissue, creating this cavity. You've also got this kinetic energy that's being pressed through there. And it comes out in like a wave. And you get these, I've turned them as kind of concussive fractures, if you will, where this energy is being transferred. This huge amount of pressure because just imagine this. You're creating this hole that if you look at the tip of your little finger right now, just look down the length of it. Think about your little finger right now, just look down the length of it. Think about your little finger. That's about, at the tip of it, that's going to be about the size of the hole that this thing would have created. So, you're injecting this energy, this blast, this force through this tiny little hole in an otherwise perfectly sealed environment. So, where's this energy going to go?

Where it's going to go, it's going to seek out the weakest points, and it's going to fracture. But this is significant for them because this explains something else that they're seeing manifested on Lincoln's body, which had been manifested before they actually pronounced him dead, and that was his eyes were swelling, the right eye in particular. And that gave them an indication that that might be where the projectile rested. The right eye is swelling.

The pupil is completely blown now. It's dilated all the way out. There's no longer any kind of nervous control over it. It's open. The eye is progressively swelling, swelling, swelling. And this is confirming everything that they're believing. But it's still a confusing mass that they're holding in their hand. They're wanting to get to this projectile.

They're wanting to find it. And one of the doctors, when you're reading over the notes of these physicians that are involved in this examination, you can actually sense that they knew what they were doing. And let me rephrase that to this extent. They knew what they were involved in. They were involved in the postmortem examination of a man who had led the country through this horrible time, which they had borne witness to. They had borne witness to it in a way that no one

else had, not even soldiers. They had seen kind of the cost in the field hospitals and the decisions that he had made along the way. They knew that the man's brain that they were holding in their hands had been making decisions directing the country over all of these years. And they described kind of the solemnity in that room, the quietness of it. And the only thing that actually shattered those quiet moments was when they finally removed that brain. There's blood and tissue that's falling away from it.

There's a basin down below that's made out of porcelain. You've got this cavernous room. It's very quiet. Earlier, you heard the sound of that saw being drug across the surface of the bone. And all of a sudden, there was this metal clank sound. It shattered the silence. Absolutely shattered the silence. And what was it? It was a mushroomed projectile. They never could pinpoint the exact location of it, but almost like, I don't know, some kind of metaphysical event, the bullet presents itself through this announcement that shatters the silence. And you knew, I think that they knew from as scientists that they had found what they were

looking for. Any kind of gunshot wound that we have nowadays, we do x-rays prior to doing the examination. First off, the configuration of the bullet has changed because the bullet was a sphere when it entered or when it exited that round. But when it slammed into the back of the bullet has changed because the bullet was a sphere when it entered or when it exited that round. But when it slammed into the back of the skull and it met that bone, the makeup of that bullet changed at that moment in time. It reconfigured itself. It's impacting bones, so it's creating these little bits of bony shrapnel that are being driven out into the brain.

And also, little elements of that lead ball are being left behind. And an x-ray, when we put an x-ray up on a board, on a light board, after we've taken this x-ray of the head, you can actually see a little lead storm and it gives you an idea of the track of the round. So you can actually, if you do a lateral x-ray, which means on the side, x-ray the side of the head, kind of like when you go to get your x-rays done at the doctor, and then you take an x-ray face on, laying face up, you get an idea of directionality. Does it cross the midline?

Those sorts of things. We have that advantage nowadays. They didn't. So at best, it's a guess at this point, Tom, as to where it actually wound up. Did the actual autopsy provide closure, relieving the doctors and attendant surgeons of any responsibility in saving the president? I mean, was there a thought? Had they done something different, he would not have died, but the autopsy confirmed there was nothing that could have been done.

It was actually assessed to be a mortal wound. Look, anything that's been said about these physicians and how they kind of ran their hands over this wound and they're trying to save his life, it's all people being very speculative about what was done wrong and what was done right. You have to measure it by those times, how they were limited in their ability to make an assessment on a patient back then. But look, I got to tell you something. These guys that were doing this assessment on the president, I would tell you that, okay, I'll put it to you this way. Let's take a modern-day surgeon, a trauma surgeon, and put them into a field hospital in 1863 in Gettysburg and have them do physical assessment on a patient. It's tough. I think that they did the very best that they possibly could. And even if he had survived, because it would appear that his brain stem was left intact.

That's why he lived for the length that he did. His chest is still rising and falling. The autonomic nervous system is still intact to a certain degree. Breathing, heart beating, all those sorts of things. Did he have, was he conscious? No. No. Would he have remained in a vegetative state?

Well, yeah, if they could have released the pressure on the skull, on the brain, because the brain is going to continue to swell. Well, they didn't have the tools. They didn't have the medicines that we use, those anti-inflammatory things that we apply nowadays to try to keep swelling down. That stuff didn't exist back then and so they did the best they could with what they had and when everything was said and done 16th president of the united states of america dead assassinated and a new president is sworn in

president johnson yeah and with him came came the wrath of what was to be known as Reconstruction. I think that probably, and again, I'm no historian, Reconstruction, I think, took on a different tenor than it would have otherwise. Interestingly enough, it was within a month or so after this that John Wilkes Booth is being autopsied. He's being autopsied on the deck of the USS Montauk up in Washington. They had shot him in a barn. The round that he took went between the C4 and C5 cervical vertebra, which they retained. They actually kept that. At his autopsy, the physicians actually trimmed that out and kept it.

You can see it in a museum in D.C. to this day. He was immobile for about two hours. They say that he lingered for that period of time. Some people have said that he had vocalized things. Other people say that he remained silent through it. One of the famous things was he asked to see his hands right before he died and made some kind of comment like useless or something like that. But when he died, they sewed his body up in an army blanket and hauled him down, put him on a tugboat and took him almost 80 miles away to the USS Montauk. And here's the big question with Booth, because he had tried to change his appearance.

He was known for this mustache they had. Well, he was absent that mustache when they got him. They took him onto the deck of that boat, laid him out on a carpenter's table, as they put it, and began to autopsy his body there. If you want to get an idea of the attitude of what happened, the physician that directed Lincoln's autopsy was also there for the autopsy of John Wilkes Booth. He showed up at the Navy Yard. He's a military officer, but he's an army officer. And when he entered onto the deck of that ship, he didn't make his presence known. And that's what you're supposed to do.

You're supposed to salute the flag and all those sorts of things that the Navy does. He went immediately, I mean, immediately to the body and started just kind of, he just immediately went in and started doing this autopsy on John Wilkes Booth at this moment in time without a lot of fanfare. I mean, they're going at it, man. They're going to do the autopsy. And that gives you an idea. You know, they were very angry.

And that's kind of, I think, demonstrated to a certain degree in the way they treated Booth's body. And, of course, Booth's body, after they had done the autopsy and assessed it, he was eventually buried. But his body was moved around and disinterred several times before it finally wound back up with the Booth family. So you've got these two men that literally changed history

with Lincoln and Booth, both ending violently, their lives ending very, very violently. Booth's name is still in our lexicon, but maybe it's there for a good reason to remember the horror that he, through this single action, wrought upon arguably the life of perhaps the best president we've ever known, Abraham Lincoln. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.

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