Here is a link to a rather more informative article about the man who killed John Wilkes Booth.
Apparently, he was seen after escaping the asylum. Once, and perhaps twice.
Not much of an article. Its a random blog post consisting of 9 scant paragraphs of opinion and rumor written by a lawyer who writes mostly about birding.
Now to be fair opinion and conjecture are hard to avoid when discussing Corbett. However, the fact that he ended up lodging in Neodesha with an old friend from the Civil War after he escaped the asylumn has never been in dispute. What he did after leaving Neodesha is the big mystery – he gave away his horse, told his friend he was traveling to Mexico, hopped on a train, and then he simply vanished into history.
The problem is is that disappearing didn’t track with his personality. On a good day he was outspoken and gregarious, on a bad day – and they were mostly bad days – he was standing-on-streetcorner-shouting-at-clouds crazy. A religious fanatic who preached his version of the gospel at every opportunity he could, he thrived on having a captive audience. He wasn’t a mountain man or wanderer who seeked peace and quiet solitude. He was an ostentatious attention-seeker who like being in the spotlight. He was also deeply paranoid about Booth’s family or random southern sympathisers tracking him down and avenging Booth’s death.
So… who knows.
There’s no proof that the “Thomas Corbett” who died in the Hinckley fire is the same man and I’m disinclined to believe it, for the same reason: Booth’s killer would not have quietly moved to a small northern town only to become a backwoods hermit. But there was no “Thomas Corbett” in the area before Boston Corbett left Kansas and of course no evidence of any other fate. It’s the only primary-source evidence of any kind that exists for Corbett’s possible death.
So again… who knows.
What really happened to the man who was once the most famous man in the country if not the world will probably forever remain a mystery.
A podcast called The Dollop has a hilarious episode about Booth and Corbett. It also stars Patton Oswalt, if that’s your jam.