Killing Lincoln - Bill O'Reilly [109]
Lafayette Baker became an instant celebrity for finding Lincoln’s killer. The red-bearded detective wrote a best-selling memoir in 1867, History of the United States Secret Service. In the book, he detailed his role in finding John Wilkes Booth. Several of his claims, including that he’d handed Booth’s diary to Edwin Stanton, led to a congressional investigation into his role in the disappearance of the diary. Soldiers had given Baker the diary upon returning to Washington with Booth’s body. Baker then gave it to Stanton, who locked it in a safe for almost two years, never telling investigators that he had the crucial piece of evidence in his possession. The publication of Baker’s memoir provoked a great public demand for Stanton to produce the diary. He did so reluctantly, but eighteen pages were missing. The secretary of war denied being responsible for excising the pages. The investigation ended without a formal placement of blame.
In 1960, a controversial amateur historian named Ray Neff came upon a description of the Lincoln assassination in a copy of Colburn’s United Service Magazine, a British military journal. The article was dated February 5, 1868. Lafayette Baker was the author. Neff claims to have deciphered a coded message from Baker within the story. The substitution code revealed a message that reads thus: “It was on the 10th of April, 1865, when I first knew that the plan was in action. I did not know the identity of the assassin, but I knew most all else when I approached Edwin Stanton about it. He at once acted surprised and disbelieving. Later he said: ‘You are a party to it, too.’”
Baker, decoded by Neff, goes on to add: “There were at least eleven members of Congress involved in the plot, no less than twenty Army officers, three Naval officers, and at least twenty-four civilians, of which one was a governor of a loyal state. Five were bankers of great repute, three were nationally known newspapermen, and eleven were industrialists of great repute and wealth. Eighty-five thousand dollars were contributed by the named persons to pay for the deed. Only eight persons knew the details of the plot and the identity of others. I fear for my life.”
There is no consensus about whether Neff’s hidden message is authentic. What we do know for sure is that Stanton did not hesitate to ask the previously disgraced Baker to lead the Booth investigation—this at a time when the secretary of war had every single detective in the nation at his disposal—and that Baker magically pinpointed Booth’s actual location when the thousands of soldiers and detectives combing the woods and swamps could not.
It should be noted that Neff’s hypothesis and his entire body of work have been repudiated and dismissed by the vast majority of trained historians and assassination scholars. Civil War Times, which originally published his findings about the cipher messages, later denounced him. Once Neff became involved with the movie The Lincoln Conspiracy and began promoting bizarre theories about Booth’s escape and a later second life in India, he became even more ostracized from mainstream scholars.
The fact remains, however, that Stanton’s withholding of Booth’s diary was suspicious, as is the subject of the eighteen missing pages. No one has adequately explained this behavior, thus allowing some conspiracy theorists to continue to wonder if he had a larger role in Lincoln’s assassination.
Baker became increasingly paranoid after the congressional investigation, certain that he would be murdered. And he was right! Just eighteen months after the investigation, he was found dead in his home in Philadelphia. While Baker was at first believed to have died from meningitis,