8. Boston Corbett vanished years after killing John Wilkes Booth
Boston Corbett was a soldier in the United States Army who, against orders, shot and killed John Wilkes Booth in Richard Garrett’s tobacco barn in Virginia on April 26, 1865, twelve days after Booth had fired the shot that killed Abraham Lincoln. Corbett came forward as the shooter after his commanding officer demanded to know who fired against orders; other witnesses claimed the Corbett never fired. Nonetheless he was presented to the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, as the killer, and Stanton ordered him released, rather than charged with disobeying orders. Corbett was a strange character who claimed to have castrated himself to avoid temptations of the flesh. In 1887 he was declared insane and sent to the Topeka Asylum for the Insane, from which he escaped the following year.
Corbett visited briefly with a man he had befriended when they were both prisoners of the Confederates (he was held at Andersonville) during the war, before announcing that he was heading to Mexico. He was last seen as he departed Neodesha, Kansas. Some believe that he went to Minnesota, settling in a cabin in the woods near Hinckley. Others believe that he died on the way to Mexico, still others claim that he settled in Oklahoma. Several men came forward in later years claiming to be Corbett, all were disproved by one means or another. A Thomas Corbett appears on the list of victims killed in a fire in Hinckley, Minnesota, in 1894, but there is no proof that the man was Boston Corbett. The killer of John Wilkes Booth simply disappeared, leaving behind little evidence of his fate.