man mortally wounded in the Garrett tobacco barn by Thomas P. "Boston" Corbett was a plantation overseer by the name of Ruddy. St. Helen/Booth had asked Ruddy to fetch his papers, which had fallen out of his pocket while crossing the Rappahannock River. Ruddy was able to retrieve Booth's papers, and while still in possession of them, Ruddy was mortally wounded in the Garrett barn, thus leading his captors to believe that he was Booth. Shortly thereafter, St. Helen moved on to Leadville, Colorado, to pursue mining, and Bates moved to Memphis, losing track of St. Helen. Bates claimed not to have believed St. Helen's story at the time, calling it an "unpleasant side of St. Helen's character." Bates described him as "modest, unobtrusive and congenial, ever pleasant in association with me. He was a social favorite with all with whom he came in contact." Despite his claims of disbelief, in 1900, Bates wrote the War Department in an unsuccessful attempt to claim the $100,000 reward advertised following Lincoln's assassination. He also informed the Department of State. Bates also wrote the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the early 1920s about his theory concerning Booth's purported escape. David E. George David E. George – possibly David Elihu George – a house painter with an appetite for drink and a knack for quoting Shakespeare, committed suicide by ingesting poison on January 13, 1903, while staying at room number 4 in the Grand Avenue Hotel in Enid, Oklahoma. He had purchased the strychnine from the Watrous Drug Store, telling the clerk, Frank Corry, that he wanted "to poison a dog" who had kept him up the night before. Shortly thereafter, store owner Eugene Watrous, unaware that his clerk had just sold George strychnine, provided additional strychnine to George "to poison a cat." By 10:30 a.m. that morning, other tenants complained of hearing groans and moans in George's locked room. They managed their way into George's room and found him writhing in pain. Despite the efforts of Dr. Champion, the local doctor, the poison had claimed him by 11 a.m. that morning. Acting Coroner Joe S. Jacobs assembled a coroner's jury, which included Mayor Charles O. Wood, and determined that George had died of alcohol and poison induced heart failure. Shortly after George's death, Methodist Episcopal minister Rev. Enoch Covert Harper came to view the body, and relayed a story to William H. Ryan,