Back in the mid to late 1980s I devoted several years to reading about and researching the Lincoln assassination for a lengthy novel on the life and crimes of John Wilkes Booth. And when I say devoted, I’m not exaggerating. I worked on this project in an almost nonstop, manic-depressive fervor for about three years. I finished the novel, but I’m embarrassed to say how long it was. I will say that I once dropped it on my foot and broke three toes.

The manuscript was under contract twice (first with Doubleday and later with St. Martin’s Press) but never got published – which is a whole other, dismal story for another time and place.

I’ve since written off the entire endeavor as a big life lesson about earnest endeavors that go awry. Fortunately, I did eventually find an outlet for my impressive reservoir of information about the still-controversial circumstances and particulars surrounding the death of our 16th — and probably greatest — President.

Since 1993, I have been leading all-day bus tours on the assassination for the Surratt Society, a Prince George's County based nonprofit devoted to continuing research about the Lincoln assassination and other Civil War intrigues. The bus tours, which we run several times a year, always sell out in advance and draw visitors from around the nation and occasionally even from outside the United States. Dozens of reporters have taken the tour and written about it for publications including The Washington Post and Baltimore Sun. A couple years ago, we even had a documentary film crew from Germany along for the ride, which begins at Ford’s Theatre in D.C., where Lincoln was shot, then retraces Booth’s escape route, ending at the site near Port Royal, Virginia, where he was tracked down and shot.

The Case That Will Not Close - Who Really Killed Lincoln?

Each spring and fall when I narrate these tours (which are fundraisers for the historical society), I meet a fascinating assortment of really intelligent and incredibly well-read people from just about every imaginable walk of life.

I also cross paths with a relatively small but vocal minority of amateur historians who have fallen hook, line and sinker for one of the many revisionist conspiracy theories that abound about Lincoln’s death, a tragic event that still evokes tears from some first-time visitors to Ford’s Theatre. For these conspiracy-obsessed true believers, the case is not closed, not even 145 years after the fact.

When I say “many” alternative theories about Lincoln’s murder, I’m not exaggerating. Depending on which of these “born-again” theorist's imaginative constructs you listen to, Lincoln’s death was really perpetrated by:

• Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War
• Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States
• The Catholic Church
• The Masons (The late Jerry Falwell was one of the most recent purveyors of this theory.)
• Mary Lincoln’s pet poodle (Well, I’m stretching it here; the Lincolns didn’t have a poodle, but if they had, I’m sure some overzealous researcher would have pointed the accusatory finger of historical calumny in his direction.)

Once, I even had a guy call me out of the blue and tell me he was setting up a 1-800 hotline to gather new information on Lincoln’s death. He went on to explain breathlessly how he and his colleagues had recently visited Ford’s Theatre and made some careful measurements that proved Booth could not have shot Lincoln -- hence the fatal shot must have been fired by someone else. (Annie Oakley, perhaps?)

I didn’t quite know what to say to this, but before hanging up, I was able to murmur in deadpan fashion. “Yes, you're right. I think Mary Lincoln did it!”

And What About Booth? Or Elvis, For That Matter?

In addition to all the sideshow second-guessing about Lincoln’s death, there are just as many revisionist versions of not only how but whether John Wilkes Booth was killed. Since the early 20th century, several highly suspect books have been published claiming Booth was not really captured and killed in a tobacco barn in Virginia’s Northern Neck.

Depending on which of these tomes you give credence to (and I give credence to none of them), he instead escaped and lived to a ripe old age under an assumed identity in (take your pick) Oklahoma, Texas or West Virginia. In the years after the Civil War, others claimed to have spotted him in Hawaii, India, and the same Iowa shopping mall were Elvis was spotted several years ago.

In the 1930s, one distinguished lady even wrote a book called This One Mad Act claiming that she was Booth’s illegitimate granddaughter. There was an ol’ boy in Virginia who has since passed on who even renamed himself John Wilkes Booth III in honor of the man he claimed was his grandfather. He never offered a shred of proof, of course, but what the heck, that would have just taken the fun out of it.

Another revisionist claim that got some traction a few decades ago, but has since lost steam, was that Booth was not shot by a federal cavalryman at Garrett’s farm but instead shot himself in the tobacco barn. (This theory was summarily disproved by the extensive forensic research of the late Dr. John K. Lattimer, the author of the fascinating, but out of print, Lincoln and Kennedy: Medical and Ballistic Comparisons of Their Assassinations.)

I’ve also heard the assertion — from some very intelligent people I might add — that high officials in the U.S. government like the Secretary of War suppressed information about the Lincoln assassination. (Not true: I know professional and amateur researchers who have literally spent decades in the National Archives and the Library of Congress, who were on a first-name basis with the staff and at times have virtually had the run of the place and access to everything, either filed or unfiled. Even though these researchers have uncovered some historical gems while rummaging through boxes of unsorted material, including a surprisingly empathetic letter that Booth wrote to his mother in 1864 that didn’t come to light until about 30 years ago, they found no suppressed documents.)

Papers and Pages Missing

A century or so ago, along these same lines, one self-styled historian even unleashed the canard that Robert Lincoln had papers relating to the real truth behind his father’s murder but burned them one by one in his fireplace before he died in 1926. (Also patently false.)

Then there are the so-called “missing pages” from Booth’s diary, which several people claimed to have unearthed over the years, only to be discredited by historians. (Significantly, no one who has ever claimed to have found the pages has actually produced them. These missing pages were purported to point the finger at everyone and everybody.)

The fact is Booth’s diary has been studied, analyzed and subjected to nearly every modern forensic test known to man, and the resounding conclusion is that there never were any missing pages. For that matter, I’ve always thought the term “diary” was a bit misleading, because Booth was never known to keep any kind of journal. The two entries that he did make were written in an 1864 appointment book that he was carrying with him when he was on the run in the spring of 1865. And these have the self-conscious, self-aggrandizing, written-for-public-consumption ring of a letter to the editor, rather than a solitary journal entry.

We also know of instances where he tore pages from the book to write notes to people, and perhaps to make grocery lists. (Remember, there weren’t any Burger Kings or Denny’s back when he was hiding out in the thickets of Southern Maryland.)

Conspiracy Theorists Run Amok. Why?

I’ve often found myself wondering why we are all so intrigued by conspiracy theories — whether they’re about the Bermuda Triangle, alien abductions or the impending takeover of the U.S. government by (again, take your pick) NATO, the ACLU, the Federal Reserve System, the Trilateral Commission. What most baffles and confounds me is why some people don’t merely entertain these theories; they embrace them wholeheartedly; they cling to them and proselytize them with the drooling, wild-eyed, brain-damaged fervency of Moses coming down from the mountain.

Why is this? I think one of the biggest reasons is that buying into such theories and embracing them as fact gives us a sense of having an inside track, having the real scoop on some arcane, inside knowledge. With that feeling comes empowerment - the reassuring feeling that we know something that all the experts have missed.

Of course we can’t disregard another wild card in all this: the government often does lie to us, with lies both big and small. Why, after all, should we believe the establishment version of anything, even if that version has been compiled in a handful of highly accurate and credible histories by independent research with no hidden agenda, no government affiliation, no theories to prove, no one to cover up for and no political ax to grind, other than following the known facts and determining what really happened.

Another fundamental reason, I think, is the mind’s tendency to connect dots and find patterns, even where patterns don’t necessarily exist. Consider the constellations of the night sky. When I was a little kid and my grandmother gave me my first book on astronomy, I learned about the constellations. Yet I still remember the disappointment I felt when I went outside and actually tried to find Orion, Pegasus and Cassiopeia in the night sky. Sure, I found the Big Dipper, but then when my mother pointed out Orion the Hunter and his belt I could not for the life of me see any hunter or any belt, but just random stars. But some people, as Greek mythology attests, did see connections, did see patterns.

Along those same lines, I think the human imagination is often drawn not so much to known facts (which admittedly can often be boring and anticlimactic) but to the gray space and wiggle room for conjecture that lies in the void between the known and the unknowable. And for those of us with overactive imaginations, it seems like once we get the tiniest toehold in that gray space, we start concocting full-blown scenarios that are soon wide enough to fly a UFO through. And pretty soon, it’s not just a random handful of stars we’re looking at, but a fish, a winged horse or an Ethiopian queen.

Conspiracy Theories and the Federal Government

As a rule, I tend to doubt most conspiracy theories about the federal government, whether they’re the Bush administration’s alleged orchestration of the 9-11 attacks, a massive cover up of the JFK assassination, or the secret island prison camps where Vietnam-era G.I.s were permanently exiled and supposedly still reside after they contracted a deadly, highly contagious southeastern Asian venereal disease. (It was a close, trusted friend, a college professor no less, who let me in on this.)

Believe me, I’m not so naïve as to think the government never lies to us or covers things up — hell, it happens way more often than it should. But history has also demonstrated a simple axiom: if more than one person knows about a secret cover up, it doesn’t stay secret forever. I simply can’t believe there is someone out there with fresh, verifiable information that confirms that John Kennedy’s death was a mob hit and they haven't yet come forward to collect on the multimillion-dollar book/movie deal that surely awaits. The allure of megabucks and talk show circuit celebrity-dom would have flushed them out a long time ago.

The contemporary champions of conspiracy theories are, of course, the Tea Partiers (who often appear to be only a step or two removed from “Flat Earthers”). They have at times blamed America's decline on everything from the Federal Reserve System, NATO, and the Trilateral Commission to creeping socialism, gay rights, and the theory of evolution.

Of course, there’s even a fringe within that fringe that believes Obama is a foreign-born mole who was secretly planted in the U.S. as a baby so he could grow up to become the first black president and lead us toward destruction. Oh yeah, boy, that sure makes sense, about as much sense as the moon being made of Wisconsin cheese.

Another big bottom line here is that it’s always far easier to pin blame for an array of socioeconomic problems on a scapegoat than it is to look in the mirror and face the fact that we’re all part of the problem, and that we all to some extent bought into an illusion that we’re paying the price for now.

As I said, that would be asking too much. Especially when one has the comfort and refuge of reductive convictions, logic, and science; and history be damned.

There’s an old saying that the nice thing about the truth is that it’s the only story you have to remember. Sadly, the same can be said about conspiracy theories.