Born in Maryland the bastard son of a notable British stage actor, he became one of the most famous Shakespearian actors himself before turning twenty, and was said by many adoring fans and critics alike to be the “handsomest man in America.”
He was also an excellent equestrian and swordsman, his athletic prowess apparent in every character he embodied, with at least one enthralled spectator unabashedly proclaiming him “a muscular, perfect man.”
Yet, at only 26-years of age, this highly paid and sought-after leading man, who was capable of making both men and women swoon for him on or off the stage, would be the subject of the largest manhunt in the history of the United States.
And those pursuers weren’t only after his autograph...
Searching for John Wilkes Booth
The killing of Abraham Lincoln while the distracted leader was attending a play was the easy part of Booth’s rapid descent into notoriety.
Using his celebrity status to gain free admittance to Ford Theater -- and his knowledge of the layout of that familiar venue -- Booth entered Lincoln’s balcony box in full view of the president’s armed guard, and with no objection.
Once inside the darkened room, he then quietly barricaded the exit door, creeping up behind his unsuspecting victim and pulling a derringer from his pocket to shoot him in the back of the head at point blank range.
After that, there was just one possible escape route: a spectacular leap 12-feet down to the stage. But the southern sympathizer’s athleticism failed him in the act when the spur of his boot got snagged in the drapes of a Union flag.
He broke his leg in the ungainly landing. Still, the dirty deed had been accomplished and the president, mortally wounded, would be dead from an assassin’s bullet in less than 24 hours.
It was a villainous role the talented John Wilkes Booth had played about a hundred times already, but only in his mind.
Swamped and surrounded in Virginia
A week later, fully plunged in infamy and up to his knees in mud, the fallen thespian was hobbling around with a makeshift splint on his shin; he and cohort Lewis Powell inexpertly negotiating the Zekiah Swamp and the Potomac River for safe passage into Virginia, as more than a thousand troops scoured hundreds of miles of the eastern seaboard looking for him.
Unbeknownst to the fugitive, whilst he and Powell were chasing themselves and being chased in those wetlands, the body of a slain president was slowly and solemnly being transported by rail for the benefit of a grieving nation.
The soggy pair of conspirators would dramatically complete their own journey on April 26, 1865 in a tobacco barn; Powell surrendering, Booth dying in a fiery standoff.
It would be an inglorious end for the once-celebrated actor and not quite what he’d been hoping for. Nevertheless, it was the same fate that had allegedly been foretold to him by a soothsayer when he was just a boy.
