“Today’s [Chicago] Tribune contains a wretched lie about John Wilkes’ family, not one word of truth in it from end to end,” Edwin was fuming. “I suspect it is the beginning of a ‘blackmail scheme’ of which I had some intimation months ago through a Boston lawyer,” Edwin wrote his friend Laurence Hutton.
The widow of this Tribune article is only one of the twenty that wrote to me after John’s death & is the one, I suspect, who got all poor Rose’s money—some $10,000 from her. Rose says all that is ended now & that she will save her money—I hope she is not deceiving me.1
As early as April 24, 1865, June warned his mother and sister not to have anything to do with “weeping imposters,”2 but as Edwin said in his letter, after his death several women claimed to be John’s widow. Edwin had ignored them all until the Tribune article stating that John had not only been married but also was the father of two children. This last alleged widow, Martha Lizola Mills, was not so easily dismissed.
Martha Mills, “the woman claiming to be John’s widow.” Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
Martha Lizola Mills was born in 1837 in Stamford, Connecticut, to Abraham Mills, a sailor, and Mary Whitney.3 Martha’s mother died when Martha was young, and her father remarried Caroline Jenks in 1846 when Martha was nine. Her father died a year later, leaving Martha with a stepmother who promptly remarried when Martha was ten years old. Martha was now living with a couple who were not her biological parents and had no parental attachment to the preteen girl. When she ran away to live with family members in Providence, Rhode Island, her step-parents didn’t care.
In 1852, Martha, fifteen and unmarried, gave birth to a son (the boy only lived to age four). Three years later, at eighteen, as a single mother living on her own in Boston, she married seaman Charles S. Bellows.
Martha was not a woman who liked to be alone. With Bellows at sea for much of the time, she became involved with a married man, Arthur D’Arcy. A few years later, Ogarita Rosalie was born in 1859.
Martha listed Bellows as Ogarita’s father on her birth certificate, but Bellows could not have been the father. At the time of Ogarita’s conception, he was five thousand miles away at sea in South America. Since Martha was still involved with D’Arcy at the time, D’Arcy was probably Ogarita’s father. But if she named him on the birth certificate, she would have admitted that she and D’Arcy were both adulterers. Listing Bellows as the father was a way to avoid scandal. Sometime later, Martha claimed Ogarita’s father was neither Bellows nor D’Arcy. It was the actor, John Wilkes Booth. Ogarita never doubted her mother, and when she became an actress she called herself Rita Booth. Ogarita’s daughter, Izola Forrester, would later write a 500-page book claiming her grandmother Martha had been intimate with John.
Martha’s affair with D’Arcy ended when he joined the Union army in 1861. A short time later, Martha gave birth to a boy she named Charles Alonzo. Ten years later she married again, this time to John H. Stevenson. Martha listed her name as Martha L. Booth on their marriage certificate.
Charles Bellows, her first husband, was still very much alive when Martha married Stevenson in 1871. Calling herself Martha Booth could have been a way of dodging arrest for bigamy. There were more than twenty Booths in Baltimore,4 none of them related to the infamous assassin. Despite claiming a Booth surname and despite being married to John Stevenson, Martha applied for a pension as Bellows’s widow when he died that same year. Harry Stevenson was born in 1871, the same year she married John Stevenson. Although that marriage eventually went sour, Ogarita and her half-brother Harry remained friends and frequently wrote to one another.
Martha’s next husband, Edwin Bates, whom she married while she was still married to John Stevenson, was a farm worker in Burrillville, Rhode Island. The Bates’ marriage didn’t fare any better than her other marriages. When Martha died at age fifty in 1887, she was buried in Canterbury, Connecticut, not Burrillville.
Martha’s daughter, Ogarita, never doubted her mother was telling her the truth that John Wilkes Booth was her father. In 1869, when Ogarita was ten and living in Baltimore, Martha took her and her younger brother, Charles Alonzo, to Bel Air and called on Mrs. Elijah Rogers, the Booth family’s one-time neighbor. She introduced them as John’s children.5 Recalling their visit years later, Rogers said Ogarita was “very beautiful” and Alonso was “very much like old Mr. Richard Booth [John’s grandfather].”6
That brief visit with Mrs. Rogers convinced Ogarita her mother wasn’t making it up. When Ogarita began her own acting career at fifteen, she called herself Ogarita Wilkes and continued using that name until 1884 when she began using Rita Booth as her stage name and began wearing a brooch with John’s photograph in it. Was claiming to be John’s daughter a way to sell her story and bolster her career as a curiosity, or did she really believe her mother’s story?7
Like her mother, Ogarita was unmarried and a teenager when she had her first child in 1878, at eighteen. She named the girl Izola, after her mother. A year later Ogarita married sixty-four-year-old mill owner William Ross Wilson and left her fledgling stage career to live with him and Izola in Burrillville, Rhode Island. That marriage fell apart and she returned to the stage. In 1884 she married actor Alexander Henderson. A year later she had her second child, Beatrice Rosalie Booth Henderson. Ogarita died of pneumonia in 1891 at age thirty-two. Her death certificate listed her mother as Martha Mills and her father as John Wilkes Booth.8
Izola was thirteen when her mother died. She was adopted by journalist George Foster and his wife Harriet and took their family name, but she never forgot the stories her grandmother and mother told her about John Wilkes Booth and that she was his granddaughter. As an adult, Izola was a prolific writer. She published eighteen books, hundreds of magazine articles, and had a brief stint as a screenwriter for silent films, but her real passion was tracking down every rumor to prove her grandfather was John Wilkes Booth. The last years of her life were spent scouring family records and news reports for proof. In 1937, she published what she had found, a book she believed unquestionably proved her genealogy, titling it This One Mad Act: The Unknown Story of John Wilkes Booth and His Family by His Granddaughter.9
Most historians put little stock in Izola’s account of her grandmother’s affair with John. The tale is riddled with inaccuracies and contradictions, including an assertion that John did not die at the Garrett farm, that there was an alleged reunion between Martha and John in San Francisco in 1869, and that Martha bore another of his children a year later.10 Booth expert John O. Hall dismissed Izola’s book as a “romantic historical novel.”11
Two Burrillville, Rhode Island historians, Joyce Knibb and Patricia Mehrtens, are more circumspect. After sifting through all the local legends about Martha and Ogarita in Burrillville and all the related evidence, they wrote their own book, The Elusive Booths of Burrillville.12 They were able to disprove Izola’s claim that her grandmother met up with John in California years later and that he fathered another child, but there was circumstantial evidence pointing to a relationship that went beyond the scam June and Edwin worried about.
Martha’s visit to Mrs. Rogers could have been a subterfuge to learn enough to convince John’s sister Rosalie that they were sisters. But would Martha have been that much of a schemer to deceive her own daughter? Ogarita was convinced. In a letter dated July 6, 1888, to her half-brother Harry Stevenson, she referred to Rosalie as “Aunt Rosalie” and to Joseph Booth as “Uncle.”13 Rosalie in turn was convinced enough to call Ogarita and Harry “her children” and sent them money every spring and fall.14
Two other items gave Knibb and Mehrtens pause. One is a book of poems published in 1881 that Rosalie sent to Martha. The inscription on the inside cover in Rosalie’s handwriting reads: “Mrs. M. Lizola Bates [Martha’s married name] From her ever loving sister Rosalie A. Booth September 11, 1883. Many happy returns of your birthday.”15 The second is a Bible Rosalie sent to Martha. The inscription inside, also in Rosalie’s handwriting, reads: “To My Sister Izola, from her affection sister R A. B. God is our Best in time of trouble.”16
Martha in fact had kept up a regular correspondence with Rosalie and noted the date of each letter she received from her in her diaries. On February 26, 1884, she recorded: “Mother Booth [Mary Ann] fell and hurt her(self).” On October 22, 1885, she recorded: “Mother Booth died today.” She also regularly recorded the anniversary of John’s death: “J. W. B. has been dead 22 years this morning.”
Based on those letters and diary entries, the Burrillville historians said they couldn’t conclusively prove or disprove Martha Mills’s affair with John Wilkes Booth.17 Most historians, however, side with Hall for the simple reason that John and Martha were never in Richmond at the same time. At the time of the alleged relationship in December 1859 or early January 1859, John was in Richmond but Martha was in Boston (according to the 1860 census). Even Izola’s children were skeptical. There are “tantalizing bits of circumstantial evidence” Izola’s son, Richard Merrifield, wrote to his daughter, Gail Merrifield Papp, but all it adds up to is a “moonstruck woman’s fatuity over a matinee idol.”18 Yet in the back of his mind, he admitted, “I still think we’re all his bastards.”19
David Taylor, co-author of the BoothieBarn blog, like many other historians, dismisses Martha as a fraud. The reason Rosalie gave her any money, he speculates, was because her conscience bothered her about what to do with the money John had given her and felt it best to give the supposedly grief-stricken Martha money to feed John’s children. Alternatively, writes Taylor, Rosalie may have wanted to believe Martha because she missed John. Giving Martha his money was a way of preserving the “decent part of their brother’s memory.”20
Was Martha Mills a liar or simply delusional? Ogarita and Harry can’t be faulted for believing what she told them. Rosalie believed her despite Edwin and June’s admonitions. But since there is no evidence they ever met, what made her sincerely believe that she had had a romantic involvement with John Wilkes Booth?
Martha was not and would not be the first or only person to invent a life or a persona for themselves that confounds reality. Maggie Mitchell was besieged with cranks coming out of the woodwork claiming to be a relative. One woman insisted she was Maggie’s mother. A Mr. Baker wrote her several letters about his being her brother and reminded her of the little cottage where they had grown up. A Mrs. John Able, Baker’s sister, also said she was Maggie’s sister. “I am constantly learning something new,” Maggie said after reading about Able in the newspapers, “but I was not prepared to learn . . . that my name is Baker, and not Mitchell, as my parents and my numerous brothers and sisters have fondly supposed for some years.”21 Maggie said that from all she had read, she felt “the woman is honest in her belief, though how she could deceive herself so I cannot understand.” Another woman, calling herself Miss Smith, said she was Maggie’s cousin and tried to get money from Maggie.22
John St. Helen, a.k.a. David George, wasn’t after money. He may honestly have convinced himself he was John Wilkes Booth. He sported the same luxuriant black hair and moustache. He dressed like John in a tailor-made, semi-dark suit and black Stetson derby. He drank heavily and carried a gun. He was very interested in the theatrical news of the days. He often broke into lines from Shakespeare during a conversation. He convinced hundreds of people he was John Wilkes Booth.23
If St. Helen/George died believing he was John Wilkes Booth, Martha Mills’s belief that she was John Wilkes Booth’s lover shouldn’t be that astounding. Martha’s relationship with John Wilkes Booth may have been all in her mind. For her it was no less real.