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Concept
Finis L. Bates
Summary
Finis Langdon Bates (August 22, 1848 – November 29, 1923) was an American lawyer and author of The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth (1907). In this 309-page book, Bates claimed that John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, was not killed by Union Army Soldiers on April 26, 1865, but successfully eluded capture altogether, and lived for many years thereafter under a series of assumed names, notably John St. Helen and David E. George.
Bates was born on a plantation in Itawamba County, Mississippi, in 1848. He was the ninth of 12 children of planter Henderson Wesley Bates (1807–1869) and Eliza Elvira Jarratt Bourland (1815–1900). Finis Bates studied law in Carrollton, Mississippi, and in the 1870s he and his family moved to Texas, where he met John St. Helen. Bates returned to Mississippi, then moved to Memphis, Tennessee, after the death of his first wife and his subsequent marriage.
In 1869, Bates married Bertie Lee Money (born 1851). They had two daughters, Emma and Olga Bates, and a son, Bertram Money Bates Sr. (1870–1934), who married Anne H. "Annie" Koen. Following Bertie's death, in 1890 Finis married Madge Young Doyle (1869–1944), daughter of Washington Jackson Phepoe Doyle (1838–1907) and Minerva Hasbrook Selden (born 1851). Finis' youngest son by his second wife was Langdon Doyle Bates (1900–1989). Langdon D. Bates married Adrienne Marguerite Boutall in 1928 and they had a daughter named Beverly Anne Bates. That marriage ended in divorce and Langdon married Bertye Kathleen Talbert (1907–1997). They had a daughter named Kathleen Doyle Bates, better known as actress Kathy Bates.
According to The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, in 1873, Bates met John St. Helen, a liquor and tobacco merchant in Granbury, Texas. The man had a particular tendency toward the theatrical and could recite Shakespeare from memory. Bates and St. Helen cultivated a friendship over five years. In 1878, St. Helen became ill, stating:
"I am dying. My name is John Wilkes Booth, and I am the assassin of President Lincoln.
Official source
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