Episode Details

John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838 in a log house in Bel Air, Maryland, the ninth of ten children of a famous British Shakespearean actor, and as a schoolboy kept a fortune teller's prediction that he would have a grand but short life and a bad end. This episode follows him from a disastrous stage debut in Baltimore at 17, through performing as J.B. Wilkes to escape comparison with his brother Edwin, to stardom built on physical, reckless stage fights. A supporter of slavery, he borrowed a militia uniform in 1859 to watch John Brown hang, and during the war carried messages and smuggled quinine south in his theatrical trunks.

In late 1864 he funded a plot to kidnap the president and trade him for Confederate prisoners, which failed when the president changed his schedule. After Lee's surrender and a speech supporting voting rights for freed people, his aim turned to murder. On April 14, 1865, at Ford's Theatre, he timed his shot to a laugh line in Our American Cousin, stabbed Major Rathbone, caught his spur on a flag and broke his leg. A 12-day flight through southern Maryland ended in a burning Virginia tobacco barn, where a sergeant's shot severed his spinal cord.

• Booth's conspirators were sent the same night to kill the vice president and the secretary of state.
• He shouted a Latin motto warning of death to tyrants from the stage, followed by the claim that the South was avenged.
• Hiding in the Zekiah Swamp, he read newspaper coverage condemning him, including from the South.
• Dying on a farmhouse porch, he asked to see his hands and spoke of futility.
• An autopsy identified him by a neck scar from a stage injury and his initials tattooed on his hand.