Book of Secrets (2007)
The Booth Diary Page
From the film · 00:11:00
“Thomas Gates was a co-conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”
A Civil War family symposium where my great-great-grandfather is publicly accused of murder
What we know
A water-damaged page recovered from John Wilkes Booth's diary, suppressed for a hundred and forty years and surfaced by one Mitch Wilkinson
Mitch Wilkinson surfaces a page that no one alive has ever seen. The page is from Booth's pocket diary — the one taken off his body after the killing in the Garrett farm tobacco barn in 1865 — and it includes a name in the margin: Thomas Gates. The page has been chemically pre-soaked, almost erased; spectral imaging at Patrick Gates' Maryland house brings the writing back. What surfaces is a Playfair cipher, plus the marginal accusation. To clear my great-great-grandfather's name I must first decode the cipher, which means first finding the keyword. Thomas's last words, passed from Charles Gates down through John Adams Gates to my father, were the keyword. He just couldn't say it before he died.
The Puzzle
A page from John Wilkes Booth’s pocket diary, surfaced by Mitch Wilkinson. The marginal accusation against Thomas Gates is hand-written. Below it sits a Playfair cipher. Booth used Confederate digraphs. Thomas’s last word was the keyword.
April 14, 1865 — From the diary of J. W. Booth.
Thomas Gates among them — Yet the lady stands as marker, twin to her sister. The cipher follows; my own hand will not survive the night.
Apply Playfair key
Five letters. Thomas’s last word.