A Study in Sherlock

After a few minutes, Dr. Roswell Park arrived at the door with several of his assistants and nurses, and made the little hospital look as though it were being run with great professional skill. With him to assist, I began the operation. I had removed bullets from a number of soldiers while on duty in India, so I was extremely familiar with the procedure and the many ways in which it can succeed or fail. As I worked on the cadaver to make it look as though it had been opened to search for the bullet, he complimented my technique several times.

We had only the open part of the abdomen uncovered by sheets, and the deceased man who was supposed to be the president lay on his back with a face mask over his mouth and nose and a surgical cap on his head. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that we were fortunate that while millions of lightbulbs were displayed everywhere throughout the Exposition, nobody had thought to install a single bulb in the hospital.

Through Dr. Park’s nurses and assistants, we slowly fed our fiction to the outside world. We said the president was a healthy specimen, and he had been lucky. The first bullet had hit a brass button and ricocheted, leaving a shallow gash along his side. The second shot entered the abdomen at close range, but the pistol had been a small caliber, and most likely Dr. Mann would find and remove the bullet in the present surgery. Once that happened, McKinley could be expected to recover fully. But after more than four hours of surgery, we changed the news slightly. Dr. Mann had not found the bullet, which must have fragmented in the body.

This was the story all that evening. It was still the story when we moved the cadaver to Mr. Milburn’s house to recover.

At various times during the next few days we issued reports that the president was recovering nicely, that his spirits were high, and that we expected an early return to health.

Meanwhile, as Holmes told me later, the rest of the deception went tolerably well. The assassin captured at the Temple of Music was taken to the police station. He, of course, was Mr. Booth. He identified himself as Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrants, who had been struck by the inequality in the way the president was treated compared with an ordinary man. Because of Chief Bull’s fears of public emotion aroused by his crime, Czolgosz was kept apart from other prisoners.

The president had made his way into the Indian village, where he met Holmes, no longer an Italian madman. Holmes was waiting for the president with three Iroquois Indians he had met while they were studying at the University of London years before—two Senecas and a Mohawk. Holmes applied some of the makeup he had brought, and within a few minutes he and the president were the fourth and fifth Iroquois Indians. After nightfall, the five men left the Exposition in the midst of a growing crowd, and rowed across the Niagara River into Canada.

With the help of his Iroquois friends, Holmes conveyed Mr. McKinley to Montreal, where he put him on the steamship Arcturus, which sailed on September 9 for London. I’m told he was an impressive figure, registered in the ship’s manifest as Selim Bey, first cousin to the third wife of the Sultan of Turkey. He wore some makeup, a large turban, and a sash with a curved dagger in it. After he reached London he took another ship for Tangiers as the Reverend Dr. Oliver McEachern, a Methodist missionary.

Five days after the Arcturus sailed, on September 14, I was forced to declare President William McKinley dead. He had been said to be recovering, but a few days later he succumbed to blood poisoning. There was some speculation, especially in the papers in New York City and Washington, that Dr. Mann had botched the surgery. There was even some lamentation that on the grounds of the Exposition had been an experimental X-ray machine, which could easily have found even fragments of a bullet. That was precisely why I, or Dr Mann, had forbidden its use.

Nine days later, on the testimony of eyewitnesses, Leon Czolgosz, the young man who had shot the president, was convicted of murder. He was taken from the court to Auburn Penitentiary, where he was executed in an electric chair, another application of the marvels of electricity celebrated by the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The one flaw of the modern method in comparison to hanging was that when a single wire was loosened, an electric chair became simply a chair. A fine actor can perform a set of death throes that would make a gravedigger faint.