Washington City, April 15, 1865

It was two or three o’clock in the morning when the bell of Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse at 541 H Street rang “very violently.” On the third floor, twenty-­two-­year-­old Louis Weichmann, a former college chum of Mary’s younger son, roused himself from bed. After pulling on a pair of pants under his nightshirt, he ran barefooted down the stairs. Weichmann did not open the door immediately. Wary of middle-­of-­the-­night visitors, he tapped on the inside of the front door to let whoever had clanged the bell know that they should stop.

“Who is there?” Weichmann asked.

“Government officers, come to search the house for John Wilkes Booth and John Surratt,” came the prompt reply.

Louis Weichmann had seen John Wilkes Booth—­one of the most famous actors in America—­that very afternoon. Booth had stopped by to speak with Mrs. Surratt just before Weichmann had driven her into the countryside on an errand. However, Weichmann and Booth’s mutual friend, Mary’s son John Surratt Jr., had left for Canada over a week before. Through the closed door, Weichmann informed the officers that neither of the men they sought was inside.

“Let us in anyhow,” the voices outside demanded, “we want to search the house.”

But it was not his house. Weichmann was only a boarder, renting his bed and eating his meals in Mrs. Surratt’s dining room. He could not let a group of unknown men into a lady’s home in the middle of the night without her permission, and Weichmann told them so.

The officers waited on the porch while Weichmann hurried down the hall and past the parlor to Mary Surratt’s bedroom door.

Another boarder, seventeen-­year-­old Honora Fitzpatrick, who shared a bed with Mrs. Surratt, had also been awakened by the clanging doorbell. Now she heard Weichmann’s gentler knock and his voice calling softly through the door. “Mrs. Surratt, there are detectives who have come to search the house, and would like to search your room.”

Honora Fitzpatrick and Louis Weichmann would remember vastly different reactions from their landlady—­so contradictory in tone and manner, in fact, that it seemed they might have been in the presence of two different women.

One of Mary Surratt’s young boarders reported her reply thus: “Mr. Weichmann, ask them to wait a few minutes, and I will open the door for them.”

The other would insist for decades afterward that she had said, “For God’s sake, let them come in; I expected the house to be searched.”

At that moment, this detail mattered little. Whatever Mary Surratt’s response, the officers were admitted—­six or eight of them, as Louis Weichmann remembered it. There were men stationed in front of the house, and men in the alley behind it. Two detectives went directly to the attic, where Mary Surratt’s daughter and teenage niece shared a room. Before Weichmann had time to dress, two more men went into his room and peered under the bed and into the closet before examining everything else in sight.

“For God’s sake, gentlemen, what means this search of the house so early in the morning?” Weichmann implored.

The young man’s confusion startled the officers. “Do you pretend to tell me, sir, that you do not know what has happened last night?” one of them asked. Louis Weichmann insisted that he was completely bewildered.

“I will tell you,” said one of them, Metropolitan Police detective John Clarvoe, and he drew a crimson-­stained piece of a cravat from his pocket. “Do you see that blood?” Clarvoe asked, brandishing the torn necktie. “That is Abraham Lincoln’s blood; John Wilkes Booth has murdered Abraham Lincoln, and John Surratt has assassinated the Secretary of State.”

Stunned into momentary silence, Louis Weichmann followed the two detectives back downstairs, and arrived just as Mary Surratt was emerging from her room. “What do you think, Mrs. Surratt?” Weichmann said. “President Lincoln has been murdered by John Wilkes Booth, and the Secretary of State has been assassinated!”

Mary Surratt threw up her hands in astonishment. “Oh, my God, Mr. Weichmann, you don’t tell me so!” she exclaimed.