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When the mummy’s drawing power began to dwindle, Penniman finally handed it over to Bates, who had been claiming it since the beginning. Bates planned to make the mummy a sideshow, but couldn’t raise the cash. So he rented it out to other exhibitors, and John Wilkes Booth, or at least his facsimile, was back in show business. The corpse traveled as part of a show featuring lavish live marriages and freak animals. It emerged unscathed from a train wreck that killed eight people, which may have been when it picked up the legend of a Tut-style curse. Tutankhamen had only recently been dug up, and such stories were in vogue. It got kidnapped and ransomed. It was offered to Henry Ford for his museum in Dearborn, Michigan; Ford had the mummy investigated and found its credentials dubious.
By 1931, the mummy had somehow fallen into the possession of a Chicago woman named Agnes Black, who purportedly bought it for $8000. Black, and the Chicago Press Club, arranged for a group of Chicago doctors to perform an autopsy to establish the mummy’s authenticity. The doctors, led by Orlando Scott, used Finis Bates’s book as a starting point. Bates listed Booth’s physical imperfections -- a scar over his right eyebrow, the result of an accident during a stage duel; the left ankle broken in his leap to the stage at Ford’s theater; and a deformed right thumb crushed by a piece of stage gear. The thumb injury seems to have been unknown in Booth’s life before 1865. Bates apparently found out about it from a woman who claimed to have married yet another post-war Tennessee Booth.
Using gross examination and x-rays, the doctors supposedly found evidence of all three anomalies. An autopsy report signed by half a dozen physicians was issued to the press. The surgical scar on Booth’s neck is not mentioned in the report. But it is mentioned in an affidavit signed by two doctors who refused to sign the report. One of these renegade physicians attested that he had used a fluoroscope to look for scar tissue on the mummy’s neck--and found none. He said Orlando Scott had asked him to lie about this finding and go along with the “publicity stunt.” Dr. Scott told newspapers the x-rays had revealed a metal fragment in the mummy’s stomach, which the doctors retrieved by cutting through the mummy’s back. The fragment proved to be part of a signet ring bearing the letter B. The autopsy report does not mention the ring.
Booth scholar Blaine Houmes, who is also a physician and a deputy medical examiner, has seen the x-rays. He says they show no sign of a broken leg.
In 1932 a retired carnival performer named Barney Harkin owned the mummy. Harkin had worked as a tattooed man before settling down as a landlord in Chicago. The mummy lured him back. The eccentric Harkin believed Napoleon had escaped after Waterloo and a dummy had been sent to St. Helena in his place. That John Wilkes Booth was for sale in Chicago did not strike him as utterly improbable.
Harkin and his wife Agnes ran their show from a truck in which they slept at night, the mummy bunking between them for safety. Barney handled the gate; Agnes lectured the crowd, showing the Chicago x-rays and turning the mummy to show its shortened left leg. Hecklers sometimes claimed the figure was wax; she silenced them by rolling the mummy on its side and opening a flap in its back that had been cut at the autopsy. The mummy wore nothing but khaki shorts, and between shows Agnes Harkin lacquered its skin with Vaseline and combed its hair, which had gone white since the day David E. George expired with an atrocious dye job decades earlier.
Barney Harkin toured with the mummy into the 1950s. He died a destitute widower in Philadelphia. His landlady seized the mummy in lieu of his unpaid rent. The building where she stored it was demolished, and the mummy’s trail since then has been difficult to follow. Scattered reports had sideshows exhibiting the Booth mummy as recently as the mid-70s, alongside a pickled set of Siamese twins and the car in which Jayne Mansfield was decapitated. All sources seem to agree it’s now in the hands of “a private collector,” but this person declines to speak with the press.
Ken Hawkes, an autopsy assistant from Memphis, spent a decade searching for the mummy. If he ever finds it, he’d be happy to buy it. But he’d settle for a few clippings and scrapings for testing and maybe a full-body x-ray. That sort of evidence might settle the debate for good. He estimates he has checked out 2,000 leads. He once came across a collector who owned the mummified leg of a victim in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and other collectors who had complete mummies of 1920s gangsters. One lead pointed to Seattle, where Ye Olde Curiosity Shop exhibits a mummy named Sylvester. Sylvester had indeed worked under the name John Wilkes Booth at one point in his own sideshow career, but old photos of the mummified David E. George make it clear that Sylvester was only a knock-off. Sylvester’s true identity has never been established.
Hawkes located several mummies kept in homes. Some of these are relatives of the people they now reside with. According to Hawkes, the publicity surrounding David E. George in the early 1900s created a fad for mummifying relatives with a combination of arsenic and formaldehyde.
Blaine Houmes says the x-ray pictures from 1931 are studded with granules of a heavy metal -- doubtless arsenic. If the mummy still exists, the concentration of arsenic in its tissues makes it a health hazard. The elusive “private collector” may be breathing in death every day, dying of slow poison even as he hoards his immortal emblem.
Four months after my first expedition to Enid, I make another. The town has been invaded by a heat wave and a steer convention. The sign on a bank says 103 and the marquees on the hotels say WELCOME INTERNATIONAL BRANGUS ASSOCIATION. Brangus are a breed of cattle compounded of Brahman and Angus. I go to see the Brangus at the fairgrounds and, though no events are going on at this particular time, I see people in Wranglers and oversized belt buckles grooming their velvety black castratoes. They’ve been brushed to an exquisite lacquer, like contestants in a beauty pageant. When a steer looks at me it’s like gazing back into two cups of black coffee.
I visit the cemetary where lies the body of Dolly Douthitt, the colorful murderer the man at the museum told me about. The trees all around have a curiously ordered appearance, even for a cemetary. After a while I realize why. All of them, pines as well as elms, have been pruned up to about ten feet, so that the whole expanse of the cemetary is visible under a green canopy. Through that canopy I can see hawks wheeling in the clear sky. The tune of the Oklahoma state song, from the Broadway musical, suddenly crawls through my mind: “Sit alone and talk, and watch a hawk makin’ lazy circles in the sky. We know we belong to the land. . . .”
The grave is easy to find. The marker is a gray pedestal inscribed DOUTHITT, on top of which stands a six-foot black cylinder with shimmering flecks; on top of that stands a six-foot white angel holding flowers. Flanking this are two knee-high cylinders for husband and wife. The murdered husband’s epitaph reads, “God’s ways are mysterious. I am not afraid to die but want all those I have wronged to forgive me.” Dolly’s cylinder has nothing but her name and dates. Three of her children are buried in this patch of ground, all having died young; one is the suicidal Loma. The graves are pocked with the holes left by cicadas when they emerged from their winter's sleep. I hear those insects nearby, singing in the heat.
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