It seems like everyone enjoys a good murder mystery or a good conspiracy theory, especially when they go hand in hand. And it's especially cool for a writer when they manage to stumble across one they didn't expect to find.
It happened to me back in the late 70s as a Hill Country bureau chief for the San Antonio Light newspaper. Working a rural office, especially back in those days, there wasn't a good supply of breaking hard news to report from day to day so it was common to turn to local-interest feature stories as a solution to keep up with writing quotas and deadlines.
My coverage area was quite large and it became common for me to strike out in a different direction once or twice a week to visit the many small communities within my district in search of news, features and just about anything worthy of print; county fairs, music festivals, outdoor activities and the like. And it was profitable. I was stringing for several newspapers in addition to reporting for the Light, including the Austin American-Statesman, San Angelo Standard-Times and the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. If the story was important enough or the feature good enough, I could feed it to United Press International (UPI), and occasionally to the Associated Press (AP).
One good news story or feature a week and I could manage to scrape out enough living to make the house payment and bills and still have enough left over for a cup of cheap coffee. A small one.
It was on one of these feature-hunting binges that I stumbled into the Bandera library, a positively wonderful place to read about the local history. I was thinking a feature about the early Polish pioneers that settled along the Medina river might make for good copy.
 Dusting off an old hard bound blue book full of newspaper clippings from the local newspaper (reprints collected to chronicle local history of the past 120 years), I read an interesting account of a school teacher named John St. Helen who had arrived in Bandera in the early 1870s to open a private school. The article had been written based upon an 1872 news clipping from the same newspaper and sported a photograph of a handsome sort of fellow and hinted of a local scandal involving the school operator and his chosen bride, the daughter of an influential local family.
Apparently St. Helen was a true academic whose school was considered exceptional. It was also one of the few schools in Texas that taught classic literature and conducted acting classes for students. St. Helen was credited with not only being an accomplished thespian but a Shakespearean-trained actor.
According to the newspaper account St. Helen had operated the school for about three years when he met the local woman he would eventually ask to become his bride. At first all things seemed pleasant and good. But as the time for the wedding drew nearer and big plans were laid out, the school master became apprehensive and reclusive. He had apparently discovered one of the invited guests to the wedding was going to be a U.S. Marshall, a distant relative of the bride's family, and he verbally opposed the plans, insisting a small ceremony would be more appropriate and more to his liking.
The bride's family would hear nothing of it according to the newspaper report and shortly thereafter John St. Helen disappeared without a trace. He apparently didn't inform his students or their parents, his bride to be, or any one else before disappearing out of Bandera county never to be heard from again.
The newspaper story claimed that local authorities were later alerted that a federal fugitive matching St. Helen's description was reportedly in the area. After much digging and prying, a few had somehow speculated that the fugitive was connected to the assassination of President Lincoln and was sought in connection with a conspiracy to end the President's life.
It wasn't until a few years later that an Oklahoma woman claimed she had accepted a boarder into her home who was suffering from a terminal illness. According to the witness, that man identified himself as John St. Helen and often talked about his school in Bandera and his illustrious acting career. A few uneventful months passed and on his death bed, the stranger confessed to his landlord that he was indeed John Wilkes Booth, the trigger man that shot old' Honest Abe.
Well, it certainly made for a good tale, but being armed with the old photograph taken by a local photographer, I thought perhaps I could test the speculative tale.
Taking a copy of the old newspaper photo back to my Kerrville darkroom I attempted to blow it up slightly and clean it up as best I could. It was far from perfect, but when I placed the photo side by side to several photographs of John Wilkes Booth, the resemblance was more than amazing, it was stunning.
While my research was flawed as it lacked confirmation from other sources, it did make for a good feature story, one that I bounced around the newspaper and magazine market for a number of years following (including this Web site once again). Gone are my original copies of the photograph of St. Helen. Gone are my research notes and draft reports.
But I did stumble across something on the Internet the other day that rekindled the St. Helen fires. Apparently an episode of the popular TV series "20/20" and a report on "America's Unsolved Mysteries" a few years back revisited the escaped-Booth theory. Both reports centered on information collected around Granbury where a tale lives on today that a man believed to be Booth operated a saloon there locally. As in Bandera, the Booth look-alike mysteriously fled town after a U.S. Marshall started asking questions.
School teacher? Saloon operator? Presidential assassin? Who can say for sure. It's just another one of those great Texas tales that spark the imagination and, hopefully, entertains the reader.
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