Brad Meltzer's Decoded (2010) s01e02 Episode Script
Secret Presidential Codes
What if I told you that America's greatest explorer was murdered while carrying secret presidential codes? In 1809, meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark is the sitting governor of the Louisiana territory when he dies in Tennessee.
Lewis, who helped president Thomas Jefferson create one of the very first coded communications used by the white house, was headed to Washington, D.
C.
He's carrying journals of his expedition to the Pacific and ciphers, secret presidential codes, at the time of his death.
Originally, they ruled it as a suicide based on an official letter.
But now there are reasons to believe that the circumstances were way more sinister.
[ Gunshot .]
Some say that Lewis was murdered for revenge.
Others believe it was to stop him from delivering coded messages to Jefferson revealing treason.
Many think a cover-up ensued, but I can tell you one thing -- when someone dies carrying secret messages to one of the greatest presidents of the United States I want to know what happened.
I'm Brad Meltzer.
I've spent my life collecting stories.
The best include signs, symbols, and codes, secret meanings that are hidden in plain sight.
Some have become the basis for my novels, but I've only scratched the surface of what's out there.
And now history has given me the resources to investigate the rest.
This is "decoded.
" Okay, so, what do we know about meriwether Lewis? I know he's half of the Lewis and Clark team.
Yeah, not only half, meriwether Lewis was an absolute rock star and national hero.
He was selected by Thomas Jefferson as the hand-selected leader of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which effectively doubled the size of the United States.
And at the end of his expedition, Jefferson appointed him governor of the Louisiana territory.
Then these two were really good friends? Meriwether Lewis was Thomas Jefferson's personal secretary.
He trusted no one more.
Here's the thing -- Lewis is an American icon, but most people couldn't tell you much about him except for his fabled expedition to the Pacific.
Lewis was born near monticello, Virginia, in 1774, and he's given his mother's maiden name, "meriwether.
" As a child, he's constantly outdoors.
He's even believed to have spoken cherokee.
And being from Jefferson's hometown definitely did not hurt him career-wise.
He's the first presidential aid ever.
He actually lived at the white house.
The two men even developed a way to communicate in code, allowing him and the President of the United States to discuss government secrets over long distances.
It was so brilliant the U.
S.
army used it for more than 100 years.
But when Lewis returned from cataloging the Louisiana purchase, Jefferson appointed him governor of the new territory.
This was unheard of for a 35-year-old at the time, and Lewis quickly developed enemies.
So, the question we have to figure out is whether he was murdered.
His legacy has been shrouded and tainted by suicide.
Buddy's strength -- you know that old friend you can tell anything to? That's buddy.
People trust him.
People like him.
And that means he's great at getting people to reveal information.
The historical record points to suicide.
I've always thought it was suicide.
Yeah.
That's what I've always heard, too.
'Cause that's all I've ever heard, yeah.
I wonder how presidential ciphers figure into it though.
Sounds like they were communicating through ciphers.
I didn't even know that.
So, what if he was traveling with some sort of information that never got to the president? I mean, wouldn't you love to know what that information is? Absolutely.
'Cause if we know that the information is, then we know who had a motive to kill him.
What were they doing that's so secretive? McKinley's an engineer.
So she's analytical.
She only believes what can be proven by science.
What's amazing to me is that after 200 years, a suicide could turn into an unsolved homicide case.
Here's why we need Scott -- he's an officer in the U.
S.
army reserve.
So his expertise in military operations is exactly what we need in figuring out what happened to Lewis.
We're essentially, in retrospect, accusing someone of murder.
We need to look at it carefully.
So, buddy, Mac, and Scott are now headed to the natchez trace.
It's a rugged 440-mile horse trail through Tennessee.
This place was deadly.
Bandits and thieves routinely robbed and murdered people there.
And because of that, Lewis was by no means traveling alone.
He had a military escort, a guy named major James neelly, who suspiciously was ordered to protect Lewis by Lewis' own greatest enemy, a guy named general James wilkinson.
The general hated Lewis because Jefferson removed the general as the governor of Louisiana and gave the job to his former aide, Lewis, instead.
There's a theory that general wilkinson had Lewis assassinated with the help of major neelly and a handful of other willing participants.
Oh, yeah! [ Horse snorts .]
Can you believe this? What's with the horses? Hey, guys, how you doing? Hi, there, I'm McKinley.
Glad y'all could join us, McKinley.
I'm Jim.
Buddy.
Buddy, good to meet you.
Jim, how are you? Hey, Scott, good to meet you.
So we're riding.
Well, I thought it would be fun to have horses to go up the trace just like meriwether Lewis did back in 1809.
Thought it would be fun? Yeah, a little step back in history, just like the way it was.
[ Horse snorts .]
What did I do? Hey, buddy, you look good on that thing.
This is awesome! On horseback in the natchez trace? [ Horse snorts .]
Does she not like me? Hey, hey, McKinley! Are you coming? So [Chuckles.]
We're halfway down the trail, and I look back, and where's McKinley? Nowhere.
She's way back there still trying to get on the horse.
I can't believe buddy noticed.
He was struggling, too.
Walk.
Don't get left behind! Walk, walk, walk.
We got one off the back here.
Are we there yet? Ah, we're getting close.
[ Both laugh .]
This is just like meriwether Lewis approached, with a small party on his way east to Washington.
As we come out of the trace, he sees, just as we're seeing ahead of us, grinder's stand.
You can see the ruins of the cabin.
Imagine 444 miles of that ride.
You'd be a little saddle sore.
Why was he traveling along this trail to begin with? His original plan was to leave St.
Louis and by boat go all the way down to New Orleans and then take passage around Florida and up the coast to Washington.
But something happened that changed his thinking.
And by the time he gets to chickasaw bluffs, or what we know today as Memphis, he had decided that it was too dangerous.
He then cuts across country to the natchez trace.
And then he finds himself at grinder's stand.
And the original purpose for the trip was what? He was in financial trouble.
He's had these bills.
He submitted them for payment, and the government says, "well, you weren't authorized to do this.
" It's like submitting an expense report to your boss and having them reject it? Exactly.
And Lewis couldn't afford that.
He had speculated in land.
And when they find out that his bills have been rejected, all his creditors come in.
In fact, he finally decides, he says, "I have to go to Washington and settle this, save my reputation," and so he sets off from St.
Louis.
And then on October 10th, he finds himself here at grinder's stand.
Meriwether Lewis was desperate.
He's a national hero, and yet he's flat broke.
But he had these priceless journals.
This was the key to his future.
They chronicled his epic journey to the Pacific, two years of his blood and his sweat.
He knew he'd seen things that no other white man had.
He knew he could sell them for a fortune.
Does this sound like a man who's prepared to take his own life? Or is Lewis someone who had everything to live for? This is where Lewis arrives in the late afternoon of October 10th.
And in the pre-dawn hours of October 11th, two shots ring out.
The main person who is there and witnessed it was Priscilla grinder.
And she says that he was acting very strange.
She says, "I was afraid of the guy.
" They come in, and they find that he's been shot twice, once to the head, once to the midsection.
He says, "I am so strong.
It is so hard to die.
" And then just, they say, as the sun is coming up, he passes away.
So, let me get this straight.
There's only one witness, one person that says Lewis killed himself, and all of history is written from that? To me, that doesn't sound like evidence.
In my old neighborhood, that's called "your word against mine.
" That's something I have trouble buying at face value.
So buddy, Mac, and Scott are headed to meet one of Lewis' descendents to get their side of the story.
Well, this is where meriwether Lewis is supposedly buried.
I am his fourth-great-nephew.
Great-great-great-great nephew.
That's correct.
The official historical story seems to be that he committed suicide at grinder's stand.
We don't necessarily accept the suicide theory as such because all of that comes about from the stories told by one person, Mrs.
grinder, and then repeated over and over.
It is hard for me to understand how a national hero -- he was the number-one hero in the country at the time -- could die suddenly on the natchez trace and nobody come down here to find out why.
The family wants very much to have him exhumed.
In 1996-'97, we filed a permit with the national park service to get permission.
Then they denied it.
And they denied it on the grounds that their policy does not allow the disturbance of a grave in a national park unless it's in imminent danger of destruction.
How does that make you feel? Extremely frustrated.
We have 200 family members who signed a letter saying they want it to happen.
Now, this monument was originally built in 1848.
And when they did that, Tennessee appointed a commission to identify the body.
This is the report of a committee.
And they examined him.
And they said that it appeared that he had died by the hands of an assassin.
So you're telling me you have documentation here I do.
Physical evidence, if you will.
A doctor says it seems "more probable that he died by the hands of an an assassin"? Do I know for sure what happened to Lewis? Not yet.
But come on.
This is starting to smell suspicious.
The only doctor to examine Lewis' body after he died said he didn't commit suicide? To me, I got to start thinking, "is this a murder?" I'm starting to think that the history we've been taught about meriwether Lewis is only half true.
We know that the famous explorer was traveling on horseback to Washington, D.
C.
, that he had his priceless journals with him.
It's a fact that he died at grinder's stand.
His death was ruled a suicide.
We've uncovered that in 1848 a doctor examining Lewis' remains believes he was actually assassinated.
So, buddy, Mac, and Scott are now headed to a forensic anthropologist.
The fact that the last four people to see the body of meriwether Lewis included a doctor that said "it's probable that he died at the hands of an assassin" is credible evidence to me, and it's something we need to look into first.
This is not a serious inquisition.
This is the committee that's deciding whether they're gonna put up a monument.
I didn't say it was conclusive evidence.
I said it's compelling.
There's one source that suggested he attempted to commit suicide, and there are no further details about that.
Once Jefferson said it was suicide, the wheels were set in motion because Jefferson is a tough source to contest.
The guy effectively owns history.
Not everything is scary music.
There is some basis for the suicide claim.
Major Gilbert Russell had put Lewis under house arrest earlier in his journey, claiming that he was suicidal.
In fact, he wrote an official letter saying as much, and stating Lewis had tried to kill himself twice while he was on his way to D.
C.
So when Jefferson got the news of Lewis' alleged suicide, it was definitely tragic, but it wasn't unexpected.
So, we have this report from 1848 when they dug up meriwether Lewis.
And it said he likely "died by the hands of an assassin," but it doesn't say why they've come to that conclusion.
That's why we're meeting with one of the foremost experts in the state of Tennessee on this.
There's only four forensic anthropologists in the whole state.
This guy knows what he's talking about and will shed some light on this.
The fact that they made a comment at all makes me think that they were looking at the skull.
And these were people that were familiar with gunshot wounds.
And so -- if I can just show you -- if you have a bullet that's fired When it enters a bone, it'll have a smaller defect on the entrance side where it begins to push through.
As it enters, shear forces will cause that defect to open up on the inside.
The entrance is smaller than where it comes through on the exit side.
So if you're looking at the skull again and have a small hole on the back of the skull and a larger exit wound to the front, then that would indicate a back-to-front shot, which would be almost impossible, in my mind, with the type of handgun that they had at the time.
These are the kinds of things that the doctor could have seen that would make him make this statement.
Question that statement.
Okay.
Assuming we could exhume the body again now and the skull was in somewhat the same condition it was then, do you think we could conclusively figure out whether this was a murder or suicide? Hopefully, we would find enough detail on the skull to determine the direction of the bullet.
I think the only chance you have of answering the question is in the grave.
Okay, did you hear that? Let's put this in perspective.
You have a forensic anthropologist saying, "yes, absolutely, the doctor looking at Lewis' remains in 1848 would have been able to tell if he was murdered.
" This changes history.
His death may have not been a suicide.
So now it looks like the physical evidence actually points to foul play.
But what's the motive? Who would want Lewis dead? This guy is the Neil Armstrong of his day.
He's been to places no other American has.
There's only one guy I know who might have an answer.
So I'm sending buddy, Mac, and Scott to see him now.
Oh, look.
Oh, check it.
That's a flintlock pistol.
This replica pistol is similar to the gun Lewis was carrying at the time of his death.
Imagine the amount of damage one of those would do to your skull or your chest or both.
Yeah, that's all the gunshot sort of burns that come out of the muzzle.
"Lewis died of mysterious gunshot wounds.
" The .
69-caliber flintlock pistol that Lewis was likely killed with -- this thing was unbelievably powerful.
The ball itself weighed an ounce, twice as much as today's standard-issue .
45-caliber bullet.
Depending on the powder charge, the ball could have left the gun at a speed up to 1,000 feet per second.
The sucker was state of the art.
The technology was ingeniously simple.
To fire the pistol, Lewis cocks the hammer, which holds a small piece of flint.
When he pulls the trigger, the hammer would slam the flint against a piece of metal, creating a hot metallic spark.
When that spark drops into a small container of gunpowder, it starts a chain reaction that ignites the main charge in the barrel of the pistol, firing the lead ball.
So, think about this a moment.
With this kind of size and firepower, Lewis would have blown a hole the size of a soda can in his chest with the first shot and then would have had to have reloaded and then shot himself in the head.
With this gun, this is the case where size does matter.
Hi, I'm Tony turnbow.
Tony.
Well, I've been examining all the facts and trying to piece them together, and there are lots of inconsistencies.
And so many of the facts just don't add up.
The innkeeper's wife gave three inconsistent accounts.
In the first account, she said that Lewis appeared to be deranged.
He was talking to himself.
Some time in the night, she heard a couple of gunshots.
She went to investigate, along with the servants.
She found him lying on the bed with a wound to his head and a wound to his chest.
Okay.
In the second account, she said that she peered through the cracks in the logs, and she saw him walking around outside, and she saw him crawling across the old trace on his hands and knees.
Wait a minute.
So now not only is there only one witness, but she's told multiple stories? You smell that? This is getting stranger and stranger.
So she couldn't have seen what she said she saw.
It was impossible.
Okay.
In the third account, she told a completely different story.
She said soon after Lewis arrived at the stand, three men followed him.
Lewis pulled his pistols and challenged the men to a duel, and the men rode off.
Sometime in the night, she heard two or three gunshots.
Tony, the grinders, and certainly Mrs.
grinder, would have reason to falsify the accounts of this, correct? Well, certainly.
They came under suspicion when Lewis died.
And it would be to her advantage to try to say that Lewis committed suicide.
They would murder someone at their own tavern and take their money even though it would make their business look bad -- it just doesn't -- it doesn't -- at the time -- and listen to this, this is insanity -- it wasn't unheard of for innkeepers to kill and rob their guests.
So the grinder family was certainly suspected in Lewis' death.
Robert grinder was allegedly put on trial, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.
But of course, court records from that trial have disappeared.
Maybe they were lost in a fire.
Maybe someone took them.
But wherever they went, I want to know what really happened.
We looked at a report from 1848.
It was 39 years after Lewis died, and there was a committee that decided that "it seems more probably that he died by the hands of an assassin.
" That's correct.
But we don't know what they actually looked at.
Well, they do say that they found the grave, they opened the grave, and they examined witnesses who may have seen Lewis' body.
There are some secondhand accounts that Robert Cooper, the man who made the nails for Lewis' coffin, said that when he did that, he saw the skull.
Uh-huh.
And the skull had a hole in the back of the head.
It had a hole in the back of the head? In the back? In the back of the head.
Why didn't they quote it in this report? Why don't they just write in here, "there's a bullet wound in the back of the skull"? That really went beyond the scope of their investigation.
They were just to find the grave and erect a monument over the grave.
But whatever they saw, whatever they heard, they felt strongly enough about it to go beyond the scope of their duty.
We have no eye-witness accounts.
The first account that anybody read about the death of meriwether Lewis, it was major neelly's account.
I've been trying for 25 years to find that one piece of new evidence that might begin to unravel the mystery, and I think I may have found it.
You think you've found the missing piece that proves it was murder.
As this starts to look like a "godfather" sequel, we need to figure out one thing -- who wanted Lewis dead? The wilkinson/lewis rivalry was bitter.
Wilkinson had been the head of the u.
S.
Army for seven years when Jefferson bought Louisiana from the French.
This guy was the most powerful person in the country besides the president.
Yet when it came time to choose someone to lead the most important mission in the history of the United States, who does Jefferson choose? His protégé, Lewis, without consulting wilkinson.
Wilkinson was also known to have had ties to Aaron burr, who Jefferson removed as his vice-president under suspicion of treason.
Maybe the most damning evidence of their rivalry is the fact that Lewis rejected wilkinson's invitation to establish the Western territories as their own nation.
This is a guy with tons of reasons to be bitter and even more reasons to want Lewis to disappear.
So, meriwether Lewis is traveling to Washington, D.
C.
, with major James neelly at the time of his death.
Some people believe that neelly's boss, general wilkinson -- this is Lewis' greatest enemy -- ordered major neelly to kill the explorer and then pay the grinders to cover it up with a suicide story.
But now we find out there's an ongoing investigation into court documents surrounding the case, and, more important, we now know we're not the only ones on this trail.
How do figure it out? What's the next step? In all three of those stories that the witness told, there are shots fired.
Mm-hmm.
Whether there's two or three shots, there are shots fired.
Well, I was thinking about that today as we were going through everything.
And I think the next step, what I'd like to see, is -- I'll call it ballistics-type testing.
I'd love to get ahold of that gun or one like it, love to get some ammunition like that, and then get one of those gel dummies, if we could get ahold of one.
Seriously? Absolutely -- and shoot it.
There's seriously a -- like you can -- like a person? Absolutely.
And does it splatter? It doesn't really splatter, but what it is is the substance is very similar to what it would be like if it hit a human being.
You can see the depth.
You can see the impact.
So if we can figure out a way to get something like that set up, I think it's really gonna tell us a lot about what's going on.
Because, really, we want to see -- could you take that kind of gun, turn it to yourself, boom, boom, you know -- exactly, and how far it would go in, what kind of damage it would do, would it come all the way through -- all that stuff can be answered.
If we can get that stuff done, it's gonna really answer some questions.
Just promise you won't use me as the gel dummy.
Well, that's exactly what I was thinking of, the jelly-doughnut dummy.
[ Laughs .]
I'm really excited to see this gun, 1799 .
69 -caliber north & Cheney horseman's pistol.
And they're elegant.
So, this is the gun.
Yes.
This is the kind of gun.
Yes, this is the gun.
Wow, look at that thing.
A reproduction of the 1799 north & Cheney.
It's quite a powerful pistol for its day, too.
How does this thing work? Well, it's a flintlock.
Him being a military man, he probably used a cartridge that had the 1-ounce lead ball.
Oh, man.
That's nearly twice as much as, say, a .
45 automatic.
This pistol was called a horse pistol because it had to be powerful enough to put down an enemy's cavalry horse.
Oh! Wow.
On the run.
On the run, that's right.
So it had to go through not just a man's skull, but a horse's skull or break a horse's neck bones.
Point-blank range, this thing would do considerable damage.
Today, it would be the most powerful military pistol around at short range.
So, is our forensic scientist with the ballistic dummy here yet? Absolutely.
He's waiting on the range for us right now.
Excellent, that's gonna be great.
Let's go do some shooting.
Let's do it.
Look at it.
David, how are you? I'm Scott.
Hi, Scott.
Nice to meet you.
Well, we're trying to reproduce what theoretically happened in the suicide of meriwether Lewis.
So we're gonna utilize a ballistic gelatin dummy, or mannequin.
The type of plastic that's being used in the skeleton is the same density as human bone.
It's been covered by a 10% gelatin material that resembles human skin as close as we can get in a forensic laboratory.
But it certainly does represent for us ballistically to fire into to try and reproduce what might have happened in an actual shooting scenario, as in the case of meriwether Lewis.
So we're gonna get to shoot this thing.
Yes, you are.
So, which one of you is gonna shoot the dummy? That would be me.
I'm gonna do that.
Definitely me.
[ Laughs .]
What do you want to do? Rocks, paper, scissors? Shooting competition? We'll have a shoot-off to shoot him.
Whoever gets closest gets to shoot the jelly bastard here.
Okay.
Are we ready? Flintlock and load.
All right.
You hit him right in the head, right in the nose.
[ Laughs .]
You hit him right in the nose.
Whoa! Oh, he's to the left.
Over his shoulder.
You didn't get in the black.
I'm in the target.
I'm in the target.
I'm out.
Aah! That's good, take your time.
Ho! Ho! Aah! [ Laughs .]
Where'd you get him? She got him in the neck! Oh, slightly lower than mine.
You get to shoot him! [ Laughs .]
Well, it's one thing for me to lose to McKinley in shooting.
But for a guy like Scott rolle, trained army reserve, it's got to hurt.
That victory was so sweet.
If you think I let those guys off the hook, you are out of your mind.
[ Laughs .]
Buddy Scott McKinley.
You got it.
You got it.
Nice job.
Fair and square? Thank you, thank you.
All right.
Let's do it.
Uh-oh.
Oh! [ Laughing .]
Oh, my God! He is not looking good.
Look at the stippling on that sucker! Dude! [ Laughing .]
Look at that! You took a chunk out of that guy's head.
Oh, my God.
Bam! Look at that.
Oh, it did not exit the back of his head, though.
So this was the path of least resistance.
At some point -- oh, it deflected.
Yeah.
The whole side of his head is blown out.
That's some serious damage.
Let's go see what happens when you shoot the chest.
Okay.
I'll try and hit it.
Oh, you're gonna hit it.
Here, let me get these on.
She already outshot us.
Thank you.
Live round, full cock, ready to fire.
Oh! Ow! Aah! Right in the heart! No exit wound.
See? So it's in there.
But how far in there? David, as a forensic scientist, do you think there's any way that he could have survived this first shot to the skull? Not in my opinion.
With the amount of damage to the skull, the placement, the brain, it should have been the end right there.
Okay, important details -- it doesn't matter who won the gunfight.
I don't care that McKinley won.
But, one, I should have been the one who shot the dummy -- it's my name above the show.
Two, that gel dummy is the freakiest thing I've ever seen, and I want one.
Think about it, the truth is hidden in plain sight here.
I mean, a bullet fired from that gun at that close range would have killed a man with one shot, much less two.
And then when we did the ballistics tests, there was no exit wound in the back of the skull.
And yet all the reports that we read told us that there was a hole in the back of Lewis' skull.
It didn't make any sense.
With so much physical evidence pointing toward murder, it seemed impossible to me that no one had ever made an official inquiry.
So I actually did some digging, and I found a coroner's inquest that was done in 1996.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott are gonna take a look at it now.
Hi.
Hi, welcome to the Lewis county public library.
We were sent here to look for some information on an inquest that happened in 1996 on the last days of meriwether Lewis.
I have the coroner's transcript here.
This is great.
"Coroner's inquest: The death of meriwether Lewis.
" "1996.
" So this is a coroner's inquest.
I was under the impression a coroner's inquest included a body.
Well, it's a little difficult when the body has been dead for, at the time of the inquest, over 150 years.
Right.
But they got together some of the leading scientists in various fields like psychiatry, forensic science, just various fields, handwriting analysis.
Why would you do handwriting analysis at a coroner's inquest? One of the questions that came up was major Russell's letter 'cause, you know, he was the commanding officer at fort pickering at the time that Lewis arrived in 1809.
This is the guy that nursed him back to health before sending him back on the road? Well, yes.
Russell claimed that Lewis arrived in a deranged state of mind.
And, of course, this is his formal statement saying, you know, "Lewis came here.
He was deranged.
I held him.
He got better, and he died of suicide.
" This is his formal statement.
And one of the interesting things is when they did the analysis, they found out that this was not written by major Russell.
What? Really? No, it wasn't.
So this is a complete fabrication? Yes.
Who do you think did it? Let me be clear.
Thomas Jefferson is one of my greatest heroes.
The man wrote the declaration of independence and never took credit for writing it while he was alive.
And I've been asking myself, "where's Jefferson been this whole time? How could he have just accepted that Lewis killed himself with no questions asked?" This is one of his closest confidants.
It's because Jefferson believed the Russell statement, which said that Lewis was suicidal.
Now we have reason to believe that that document is a fake and that Jefferson himself might have been duped.
And if that's the case, I question everything and start wondering what in the world really happened that day.
Based on what the team's found, we may have uncovered a complex plot to murder meriwether Lewis.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott have been piecing it together, from major James neelly to innkeeper Robert grinder and the mastermind, general James wilkinson.
This was analyzed by a forensic handwriting analyst.
Yes.
It was found to be a forgery.
This was not written by major Russell.
It's not his handwriting.
It's not his signature.
They had several written by him, but this document here was not written by major Russell.
So much rests on this.
Mm-hmm.
This is the reason people think he committed suicide.
It's the reason i thought he committed suicide.
Could this have been a forgery by somebody who was trying to cover up their own involvement? Well, there was a lot at stake.
You want to prove that he died of suicide, then you need someone of an official title to send an official report to make it look nice.
[ Laughter .]
I mean, well -- as nice as suicides can go.
As nice as suicides can be.
There was no inquest.
There was nothing at the time of his death.
We don't know if it was because he was murdered and they're trying to hide it.
So if he was murdered, who do you think did it? Well, the number-one suspect is Robert grinder.
Mm-hmm.
You know, he was the proprietor of the inn, and he was supposed to be away the night that Lewis died.
Lewis' cash that he was carrying turned up missing.
And about that time, Robert grinder came into a large sum of money.
That's convenient for him.
It sort of gives us a motive here, right? One of the more interesting stories is that general James wilkinson was involved in Lewis' murder.
Yeah, this guy keeps coming up, kind of a bad dude.
He was a very powerful man.
In fact, it's super complicated, but there has been a whole book written about the wilkinson conspiracy by a lady named Kira Gale.
Your best bet to get information about wilkinson would be to contact Kira Gale.
Well, if she wrote the book on it, we need to talk to her, right? General James wilkinson is the same guy who conspired with Jefferson's vice-president Aaron burr about overthrowing the government and forming a new country.
Can you say "shady"? And if wilkinson wanted Lewis dead, it wouldn't be hard for him to make it happen.
At this point, the guy's running the U.
S.
army.
When James Madison became president in 1809, the federal government didn't have much power over the states, and they had almost no budget to manage the country.
And that was exactly as the founding fathers had planned it.
But it was a huge problem for Lewis.
He'd over-extended himself under the assumption that he could sell his memoirs for a great deal of money.
And now with his mentor Jefferson gone and congress rejecting the expenses he incurred from governing the Louisiana territory, it left Lewis no choice but to take matters into his own hands and set off on the trail.
This meant that wilkinson had opportunity in neelly and motive due to Lewis taking his job.
We understand that you've got some information about general James wilkinson and his connection to the demise of meriwether Lewis.
I believe that general wilkinson had meriwether Lewis assassinated.
Why do you believe that? Well, he had a reputation as an assassin.
He had been accused of murdering people some times before.
I think wilkinson murdered anybody that stood in his personal way.
General wilkinson was also the first governor of Louisiana territory.
And he was a corrupt governor.
He only lasted a year.
President Jefferson had appointed him.
So when Lewis came back from the expedition, he wasn't in Washington a day before Jefferson said, "would you be the new governor of Louisiana territory?" This guy's out! 'Cause he needed someone he trusted.
Right.
Both: Okay.
So he replaced general wilkinson.
And that would explain some of the bad feeling between wilkinson and Lewis.
Yeah.
The other thing is because Lewis was now governor, he well could have found information that was quite damaging.
Absolutely.
Ah.
And general wilkinson was afraid of him and what he would be carrying to Washington.
And he was on his way to Washington.
Yeah.
When they call someone a renaissance man, it's always hyperbole.
They don't mean it.
But they mean it with Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was the true renaissance man -- successful as an author, farmer, architect, musician, even an inventor.
One of his lesser-known inventions was a cipher that he and Lewis could use for secret communications during Lewis' trip to the Pacific.
The basis was a 200-year-old French system called a trithemius.
The key to the cipher is a word known only to the participants -- in this case, Jefferson and Lewis.
To use it, a page was filled with columns and rows containing the letters of the alphabet.
The far right-hand column featured numbers starting with one and ending with zero.
The key word would then control how letters from the cipher were substituted for letters in the words of the original message.
With the key word, either of the men could easily interpret a message from the other.
And the key word for Lewis and Jefferson? "Artichokes.
" You know what? It sounds like Lewis wasn't depressed.
He was pissed.
Yeah.
You know? [ Laughing .]
That's a good point.
I agree with that.
Kira, we just saw the letter written by Russell that causes a lot of people to believe that meriwether Lewis committed suicide.
But we've been told it's a forgery.
That was established at the coroner's inquest by the F.
B.
I.
Document examiners.
And yet everyone jumped on that and believed it, and there was no substantiation to the attempted suicides? There is none besides that forgery.
We've learned that meriwether Lewis would sometimes communicate with ciphers.
Do you think this had anything to do with his murder? He could have been carrying something in cipher.
If it was particularly sensitive information, I would expect that he would 'cause he was a longtime friend of Jefferson's.
Jefferson was obsessed with codes.
In fact, he came up with one so unbreakable it was used by the U.
S.
army up until World War II.
It was a cipher wheel.
And they say he got the idea from luggage locks.
But what's really fascinating to me and seems most relevant to meriwether Lewis' story are the coded messages that Lewis and Jefferson exchanged ranking the loyalty of military officers so they could downsize the military.
This was dangerous communication, so they devised one of the world's first presidential secret codes.
A list of all ranking officers had a column titled "remarks.
" And Lewis would input secret symbols telling Jefferson whether that officer was to be trusted or not.
This symbol by someone's name, an "x" with two dots, meant the officer was opposed to the administration but was otherwise a respectable officer.
And you know what the very first name on this list was? You got it.
Lewis' Nemesis, general James wilkinson, with the column for remarks conspicuously left blank.
That means "we hate this guy.
" That needed no further mention.
They knew this guy.
They knew his wrath.
And right now, it looks like Lewis may have been on the receiving end of that wrath.
Most people that had sensitive information communicated in ciphers.
So, let me get this straight, in your mind, it's possible that Lewis was hurrying to Washington not only to solve his voucher problem but to potentially get some very important information to Jefferson? Yes.
This whole cipher thing fascinated me.
Maybe wilkinson was afraid of what the ciphers Lewis was carrying with him to D.
C.
said.
I mean, when major neelly arrived with the expedition journals in D.
C.
, they had reportedly been rifled through as if someone had gone through them looking for something.
What if neelly was trying to figure out what Lewis and Jefferson were communicating about? So if we accept that wilkinson had Lewis murdered, how did he actually do it? The innkeeper Robert grinder where he was staying came back and murdered him.
He came into a lot of money, and he moved.
So the question is -- where did he get the money? Right.
Was he paid by wilkinson? Yes.
There's only one man who could have organized it.
So we've got wilkinson the secret Agent connected to assassinations, connected to Aaron burr.
Hang on a second, guys.
It's Tony.
Hey, Tony.
Yeah, it's Scott.
I got that information I talked to you about yesterday.
Seriously? I think this is gonna cast a whole new light on the Lewis case.
I'm across town at the office.
Can you come over? Okay, listen, we're not far.
Wait there.
We'll be right over, okay? All right, great, thanks a lot.
This is potentially amazing.
This is new info.
No one's ever seen it before.
And it's exactly what I was hoping for when we started looking into Lewis' death.
So far, buddy, Mac, and Scott have found out that it doesn't look like meriwether Lewis committed suicide.
From what we can tell, it looks like he was murdered and that the killing might have been covered up by one of the top members of our military.
And now we may have found solid new proof that no one has seen before.
Tony, how are you? Thanks so much for calling.
It's nice to see you again.
Yeah, I've got some pretty exciting news.
Have a seat.
Yeah, Tony, it sounded like it.
How do we know that meriwether Lewis died October 11, 1809? It all comes down to the statement of one man, major neelly.
So I began to do some research into major neelly's life.
And I began to find that there were a lot of lawsuits that were filed against major neelly.
One of those lawsuits was actually tried the day that neelly said Lewis committed suicide.
And I was able to pull the original habeas corpus that required that actual personal appearance of James neelly on the second Monday of October, 1809.
And I also found the appearance bond that James neelly signed, agreeing to be in court on that date.
I was absolutely stunned.
This new evidence proved that major James neelly was in court in Franklin, Tennessee -- that's 60 miles away, 2 days' ride by horse -- when he claimed to have been at grinder's inn writing the letter he sent to Jefferson.
I talked to two independent handwriting experts to see if they agree that this was James neelly's signature.
And they both confirmed the man who signed the letter to Jefferson also signed the documents that were in this court file.
And if he's willing to lie about where he was when meriwether Lewis died, what else might he be lying about? In my experience, when you caught a witness in a lie, it's not the first lie they've told.
This is incredible because that is historical proof of it.
We know now that neelly lied in his letter to Jefferson.
And that's the letter that creates Jefferson's story.
It's the story that Clark hears.
And it's the story that the whole country hears.
That's the letter that really sets the spin on how Lewis died.
We know now there's no credible evidence for suicide.
This may be the key that unlocks the grave, then.
I think it changes history.
Okay, what do we think? Well, we know that turnbow has uncovered brand-new evidence that proves that James neelly was a liar.
Absolutely no credibility on any of this anymore.
And he's the reason for the last 200 years that we've believed that meriwether Lewis committed suicide.
Right.
That's huge because neelly writes the letter to Jefferson that says Lewis committed suicide.
Yeah, and history has hinged on that very letter for 200 years.
And the evidence that turnbow turned up at the courthouse is incredible evidence.
I mean, it's admissible in court.
Two handwriting experts have shown that it was neelly's handwriting and proves definitively that he was not where he said he was.
The whole idea, then, falls apart.
He's the originator of the story.
If he's a liar, we're starting from scratch.
So, what do we know about Lewis? He's a guy who finishes tasks.
He went all the way to the coast and back.
He's on a mission to Washington when he dies.
This is not a guy who's gonna kill himself in the middle of a mission.
Meriwether Lewis was murdered.
His murder was covered up.
And his body needs to be exhumed.
Absolutely.
His family deserves it.
He deserves it.
And our country deserves to know the answer to that.
What buddy, Mac, and Scott have just found out is potentially a rewriting of history.
If the only account of Lewis' suicide comes from a letter written by James neelly and neelly wasn't even at grinder's stand when Lewis died, then neelly's account can't be trusted.
I write cover-up stories, and this as good a cover-up as I've ever seen.
It seems to me we've taken the first steps toward correcting the legacy of an American legend.
But the only way to truly clear Lewis' name is to exhume his body from the dirt of Tennessee.
-- Captions by vitac --
Lewis, who helped president Thomas Jefferson create one of the very first coded communications used by the white house, was headed to Washington, D.
C.
He's carrying journals of his expedition to the Pacific and ciphers, secret presidential codes, at the time of his death.
Originally, they ruled it as a suicide based on an official letter.
But now there are reasons to believe that the circumstances were way more sinister.
[ Gunshot .]
Some say that Lewis was murdered for revenge.
Others believe it was to stop him from delivering coded messages to Jefferson revealing treason.
Many think a cover-up ensued, but I can tell you one thing -- when someone dies carrying secret messages to one of the greatest presidents of the United States I want to know what happened.
I'm Brad Meltzer.
I've spent my life collecting stories.
The best include signs, symbols, and codes, secret meanings that are hidden in plain sight.
Some have become the basis for my novels, but I've only scratched the surface of what's out there.
And now history has given me the resources to investigate the rest.
This is "decoded.
" Okay, so, what do we know about meriwether Lewis? I know he's half of the Lewis and Clark team.
Yeah, not only half, meriwether Lewis was an absolute rock star and national hero.
He was selected by Thomas Jefferson as the hand-selected leader of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which effectively doubled the size of the United States.
And at the end of his expedition, Jefferson appointed him governor of the Louisiana territory.
Then these two were really good friends? Meriwether Lewis was Thomas Jefferson's personal secretary.
He trusted no one more.
Here's the thing -- Lewis is an American icon, but most people couldn't tell you much about him except for his fabled expedition to the Pacific.
Lewis was born near monticello, Virginia, in 1774, and he's given his mother's maiden name, "meriwether.
" As a child, he's constantly outdoors.
He's even believed to have spoken cherokee.
And being from Jefferson's hometown definitely did not hurt him career-wise.
He's the first presidential aid ever.
He actually lived at the white house.
The two men even developed a way to communicate in code, allowing him and the President of the United States to discuss government secrets over long distances.
It was so brilliant the U.
S.
army used it for more than 100 years.
But when Lewis returned from cataloging the Louisiana purchase, Jefferson appointed him governor of the new territory.
This was unheard of for a 35-year-old at the time, and Lewis quickly developed enemies.
So, the question we have to figure out is whether he was murdered.
His legacy has been shrouded and tainted by suicide.
Buddy's strength -- you know that old friend you can tell anything to? That's buddy.
People trust him.
People like him.
And that means he's great at getting people to reveal information.
The historical record points to suicide.
I've always thought it was suicide.
Yeah.
That's what I've always heard, too.
'Cause that's all I've ever heard, yeah.
I wonder how presidential ciphers figure into it though.
Sounds like they were communicating through ciphers.
I didn't even know that.
So, what if he was traveling with some sort of information that never got to the president? I mean, wouldn't you love to know what that information is? Absolutely.
'Cause if we know that the information is, then we know who had a motive to kill him.
What were they doing that's so secretive? McKinley's an engineer.
So she's analytical.
She only believes what can be proven by science.
What's amazing to me is that after 200 years, a suicide could turn into an unsolved homicide case.
Here's why we need Scott -- he's an officer in the U.
S.
army reserve.
So his expertise in military operations is exactly what we need in figuring out what happened to Lewis.
We're essentially, in retrospect, accusing someone of murder.
We need to look at it carefully.
So, buddy, Mac, and Scott are now headed to the natchez trace.
It's a rugged 440-mile horse trail through Tennessee.
This place was deadly.
Bandits and thieves routinely robbed and murdered people there.
And because of that, Lewis was by no means traveling alone.
He had a military escort, a guy named major James neelly, who suspiciously was ordered to protect Lewis by Lewis' own greatest enemy, a guy named general James wilkinson.
The general hated Lewis because Jefferson removed the general as the governor of Louisiana and gave the job to his former aide, Lewis, instead.
There's a theory that general wilkinson had Lewis assassinated with the help of major neelly and a handful of other willing participants.
Oh, yeah! [ Horse snorts .]
Can you believe this? What's with the horses? Hey, guys, how you doing? Hi, there, I'm McKinley.
Glad y'all could join us, McKinley.
I'm Jim.
Buddy.
Buddy, good to meet you.
Jim, how are you? Hey, Scott, good to meet you.
So we're riding.
Well, I thought it would be fun to have horses to go up the trace just like meriwether Lewis did back in 1809.
Thought it would be fun? Yeah, a little step back in history, just like the way it was.
[ Horse snorts .]
What did I do? Hey, buddy, you look good on that thing.
This is awesome! On horseback in the natchez trace? [ Horse snorts .]
Does she not like me? Hey, hey, McKinley! Are you coming? So [Chuckles.]
We're halfway down the trail, and I look back, and where's McKinley? Nowhere.
She's way back there still trying to get on the horse.
I can't believe buddy noticed.
He was struggling, too.
Walk.
Don't get left behind! Walk, walk, walk.
We got one off the back here.
Are we there yet? Ah, we're getting close.
[ Both laugh .]
This is just like meriwether Lewis approached, with a small party on his way east to Washington.
As we come out of the trace, he sees, just as we're seeing ahead of us, grinder's stand.
You can see the ruins of the cabin.
Imagine 444 miles of that ride.
You'd be a little saddle sore.
Why was he traveling along this trail to begin with? His original plan was to leave St.
Louis and by boat go all the way down to New Orleans and then take passage around Florida and up the coast to Washington.
But something happened that changed his thinking.
And by the time he gets to chickasaw bluffs, or what we know today as Memphis, he had decided that it was too dangerous.
He then cuts across country to the natchez trace.
And then he finds himself at grinder's stand.
And the original purpose for the trip was what? He was in financial trouble.
He's had these bills.
He submitted them for payment, and the government says, "well, you weren't authorized to do this.
" It's like submitting an expense report to your boss and having them reject it? Exactly.
And Lewis couldn't afford that.
He had speculated in land.
And when they find out that his bills have been rejected, all his creditors come in.
In fact, he finally decides, he says, "I have to go to Washington and settle this, save my reputation," and so he sets off from St.
Louis.
And then on October 10th, he finds himself here at grinder's stand.
Meriwether Lewis was desperate.
He's a national hero, and yet he's flat broke.
But he had these priceless journals.
This was the key to his future.
They chronicled his epic journey to the Pacific, two years of his blood and his sweat.
He knew he'd seen things that no other white man had.
He knew he could sell them for a fortune.
Does this sound like a man who's prepared to take his own life? Or is Lewis someone who had everything to live for? This is where Lewis arrives in the late afternoon of October 10th.
And in the pre-dawn hours of October 11th, two shots ring out.
The main person who is there and witnessed it was Priscilla grinder.
And she says that he was acting very strange.
She says, "I was afraid of the guy.
" They come in, and they find that he's been shot twice, once to the head, once to the midsection.
He says, "I am so strong.
It is so hard to die.
" And then just, they say, as the sun is coming up, he passes away.
So, let me get this straight.
There's only one witness, one person that says Lewis killed himself, and all of history is written from that? To me, that doesn't sound like evidence.
In my old neighborhood, that's called "your word against mine.
" That's something I have trouble buying at face value.
So buddy, Mac, and Scott are headed to meet one of Lewis' descendents to get their side of the story.
Well, this is where meriwether Lewis is supposedly buried.
I am his fourth-great-nephew.
Great-great-great-great nephew.
That's correct.
The official historical story seems to be that he committed suicide at grinder's stand.
We don't necessarily accept the suicide theory as such because all of that comes about from the stories told by one person, Mrs.
grinder, and then repeated over and over.
It is hard for me to understand how a national hero -- he was the number-one hero in the country at the time -- could die suddenly on the natchez trace and nobody come down here to find out why.
The family wants very much to have him exhumed.
In 1996-'97, we filed a permit with the national park service to get permission.
Then they denied it.
And they denied it on the grounds that their policy does not allow the disturbance of a grave in a national park unless it's in imminent danger of destruction.
How does that make you feel? Extremely frustrated.
We have 200 family members who signed a letter saying they want it to happen.
Now, this monument was originally built in 1848.
And when they did that, Tennessee appointed a commission to identify the body.
This is the report of a committee.
And they examined him.
And they said that it appeared that he had died by the hands of an assassin.
So you're telling me you have documentation here I do.
Physical evidence, if you will.
A doctor says it seems "more probable that he died by the hands of an an assassin"? Do I know for sure what happened to Lewis? Not yet.
But come on.
This is starting to smell suspicious.
The only doctor to examine Lewis' body after he died said he didn't commit suicide? To me, I got to start thinking, "is this a murder?" I'm starting to think that the history we've been taught about meriwether Lewis is only half true.
We know that the famous explorer was traveling on horseback to Washington, D.
C.
, that he had his priceless journals with him.
It's a fact that he died at grinder's stand.
His death was ruled a suicide.
We've uncovered that in 1848 a doctor examining Lewis' remains believes he was actually assassinated.
So, buddy, Mac, and Scott are now headed to a forensic anthropologist.
The fact that the last four people to see the body of meriwether Lewis included a doctor that said "it's probable that he died at the hands of an assassin" is credible evidence to me, and it's something we need to look into first.
This is not a serious inquisition.
This is the committee that's deciding whether they're gonna put up a monument.
I didn't say it was conclusive evidence.
I said it's compelling.
There's one source that suggested he attempted to commit suicide, and there are no further details about that.
Once Jefferson said it was suicide, the wheels were set in motion because Jefferson is a tough source to contest.
The guy effectively owns history.
Not everything is scary music.
There is some basis for the suicide claim.
Major Gilbert Russell had put Lewis under house arrest earlier in his journey, claiming that he was suicidal.
In fact, he wrote an official letter saying as much, and stating Lewis had tried to kill himself twice while he was on his way to D.
C.
So when Jefferson got the news of Lewis' alleged suicide, it was definitely tragic, but it wasn't unexpected.
So, we have this report from 1848 when they dug up meriwether Lewis.
And it said he likely "died by the hands of an assassin," but it doesn't say why they've come to that conclusion.
That's why we're meeting with one of the foremost experts in the state of Tennessee on this.
There's only four forensic anthropologists in the whole state.
This guy knows what he's talking about and will shed some light on this.
The fact that they made a comment at all makes me think that they were looking at the skull.
And these were people that were familiar with gunshot wounds.
And so -- if I can just show you -- if you have a bullet that's fired When it enters a bone, it'll have a smaller defect on the entrance side where it begins to push through.
As it enters, shear forces will cause that defect to open up on the inside.
The entrance is smaller than where it comes through on the exit side.
So if you're looking at the skull again and have a small hole on the back of the skull and a larger exit wound to the front, then that would indicate a back-to-front shot, which would be almost impossible, in my mind, with the type of handgun that they had at the time.
These are the kinds of things that the doctor could have seen that would make him make this statement.
Question that statement.
Okay.
Assuming we could exhume the body again now and the skull was in somewhat the same condition it was then, do you think we could conclusively figure out whether this was a murder or suicide? Hopefully, we would find enough detail on the skull to determine the direction of the bullet.
I think the only chance you have of answering the question is in the grave.
Okay, did you hear that? Let's put this in perspective.
You have a forensic anthropologist saying, "yes, absolutely, the doctor looking at Lewis' remains in 1848 would have been able to tell if he was murdered.
" This changes history.
His death may have not been a suicide.
So now it looks like the physical evidence actually points to foul play.
But what's the motive? Who would want Lewis dead? This guy is the Neil Armstrong of his day.
He's been to places no other American has.
There's only one guy I know who might have an answer.
So I'm sending buddy, Mac, and Scott to see him now.
Oh, look.
Oh, check it.
That's a flintlock pistol.
This replica pistol is similar to the gun Lewis was carrying at the time of his death.
Imagine the amount of damage one of those would do to your skull or your chest or both.
Yeah, that's all the gunshot sort of burns that come out of the muzzle.
"Lewis died of mysterious gunshot wounds.
" The .
69-caliber flintlock pistol that Lewis was likely killed with -- this thing was unbelievably powerful.
The ball itself weighed an ounce, twice as much as today's standard-issue .
45-caliber bullet.
Depending on the powder charge, the ball could have left the gun at a speed up to 1,000 feet per second.
The sucker was state of the art.
The technology was ingeniously simple.
To fire the pistol, Lewis cocks the hammer, which holds a small piece of flint.
When he pulls the trigger, the hammer would slam the flint against a piece of metal, creating a hot metallic spark.
When that spark drops into a small container of gunpowder, it starts a chain reaction that ignites the main charge in the barrel of the pistol, firing the lead ball.
So, think about this a moment.
With this kind of size and firepower, Lewis would have blown a hole the size of a soda can in his chest with the first shot and then would have had to have reloaded and then shot himself in the head.
With this gun, this is the case where size does matter.
Hi, I'm Tony turnbow.
Tony.
Well, I've been examining all the facts and trying to piece them together, and there are lots of inconsistencies.
And so many of the facts just don't add up.
The innkeeper's wife gave three inconsistent accounts.
In the first account, she said that Lewis appeared to be deranged.
He was talking to himself.
Some time in the night, she heard a couple of gunshots.
She went to investigate, along with the servants.
She found him lying on the bed with a wound to his head and a wound to his chest.
Okay.
In the second account, she said that she peered through the cracks in the logs, and she saw him walking around outside, and she saw him crawling across the old trace on his hands and knees.
Wait a minute.
So now not only is there only one witness, but she's told multiple stories? You smell that? This is getting stranger and stranger.
So she couldn't have seen what she said she saw.
It was impossible.
Okay.
In the third account, she told a completely different story.
She said soon after Lewis arrived at the stand, three men followed him.
Lewis pulled his pistols and challenged the men to a duel, and the men rode off.
Sometime in the night, she heard two or three gunshots.
Tony, the grinders, and certainly Mrs.
grinder, would have reason to falsify the accounts of this, correct? Well, certainly.
They came under suspicion when Lewis died.
And it would be to her advantage to try to say that Lewis committed suicide.
They would murder someone at their own tavern and take their money even though it would make their business look bad -- it just doesn't -- it doesn't -- at the time -- and listen to this, this is insanity -- it wasn't unheard of for innkeepers to kill and rob their guests.
So the grinder family was certainly suspected in Lewis' death.
Robert grinder was allegedly put on trial, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.
But of course, court records from that trial have disappeared.
Maybe they were lost in a fire.
Maybe someone took them.
But wherever they went, I want to know what really happened.
We looked at a report from 1848.
It was 39 years after Lewis died, and there was a committee that decided that "it seems more probably that he died by the hands of an assassin.
" That's correct.
But we don't know what they actually looked at.
Well, they do say that they found the grave, they opened the grave, and they examined witnesses who may have seen Lewis' body.
There are some secondhand accounts that Robert Cooper, the man who made the nails for Lewis' coffin, said that when he did that, he saw the skull.
Uh-huh.
And the skull had a hole in the back of the head.
It had a hole in the back of the head? In the back? In the back of the head.
Why didn't they quote it in this report? Why don't they just write in here, "there's a bullet wound in the back of the skull"? That really went beyond the scope of their investigation.
They were just to find the grave and erect a monument over the grave.
But whatever they saw, whatever they heard, they felt strongly enough about it to go beyond the scope of their duty.
We have no eye-witness accounts.
The first account that anybody read about the death of meriwether Lewis, it was major neelly's account.
I've been trying for 25 years to find that one piece of new evidence that might begin to unravel the mystery, and I think I may have found it.
You think you've found the missing piece that proves it was murder.
As this starts to look like a "godfather" sequel, we need to figure out one thing -- who wanted Lewis dead? The wilkinson/lewis rivalry was bitter.
Wilkinson had been the head of the u.
S.
Army for seven years when Jefferson bought Louisiana from the French.
This guy was the most powerful person in the country besides the president.
Yet when it came time to choose someone to lead the most important mission in the history of the United States, who does Jefferson choose? His protégé, Lewis, without consulting wilkinson.
Wilkinson was also known to have had ties to Aaron burr, who Jefferson removed as his vice-president under suspicion of treason.
Maybe the most damning evidence of their rivalry is the fact that Lewis rejected wilkinson's invitation to establish the Western territories as their own nation.
This is a guy with tons of reasons to be bitter and even more reasons to want Lewis to disappear.
So, meriwether Lewis is traveling to Washington, D.
C.
, with major James neelly at the time of his death.
Some people believe that neelly's boss, general wilkinson -- this is Lewis' greatest enemy -- ordered major neelly to kill the explorer and then pay the grinders to cover it up with a suicide story.
But now we find out there's an ongoing investigation into court documents surrounding the case, and, more important, we now know we're not the only ones on this trail.
How do figure it out? What's the next step? In all three of those stories that the witness told, there are shots fired.
Mm-hmm.
Whether there's two or three shots, there are shots fired.
Well, I was thinking about that today as we were going through everything.
And I think the next step, what I'd like to see, is -- I'll call it ballistics-type testing.
I'd love to get ahold of that gun or one like it, love to get some ammunition like that, and then get one of those gel dummies, if we could get ahold of one.
Seriously? Absolutely -- and shoot it.
There's seriously a -- like you can -- like a person? Absolutely.
And does it splatter? It doesn't really splatter, but what it is is the substance is very similar to what it would be like if it hit a human being.
You can see the depth.
You can see the impact.
So if we can figure out a way to get something like that set up, I think it's really gonna tell us a lot about what's going on.
Because, really, we want to see -- could you take that kind of gun, turn it to yourself, boom, boom, you know -- exactly, and how far it would go in, what kind of damage it would do, would it come all the way through -- all that stuff can be answered.
If we can get that stuff done, it's gonna really answer some questions.
Just promise you won't use me as the gel dummy.
Well, that's exactly what I was thinking of, the jelly-doughnut dummy.
[ Laughs .]
I'm really excited to see this gun, 1799 .
69 -caliber north & Cheney horseman's pistol.
And they're elegant.
So, this is the gun.
Yes.
This is the kind of gun.
Yes, this is the gun.
Wow, look at that thing.
A reproduction of the 1799 north & Cheney.
It's quite a powerful pistol for its day, too.
How does this thing work? Well, it's a flintlock.
Him being a military man, he probably used a cartridge that had the 1-ounce lead ball.
Oh, man.
That's nearly twice as much as, say, a .
45 automatic.
This pistol was called a horse pistol because it had to be powerful enough to put down an enemy's cavalry horse.
Oh! Wow.
On the run.
On the run, that's right.
So it had to go through not just a man's skull, but a horse's skull or break a horse's neck bones.
Point-blank range, this thing would do considerable damage.
Today, it would be the most powerful military pistol around at short range.
So, is our forensic scientist with the ballistic dummy here yet? Absolutely.
He's waiting on the range for us right now.
Excellent, that's gonna be great.
Let's go do some shooting.
Let's do it.
Look at it.
David, how are you? I'm Scott.
Hi, Scott.
Nice to meet you.
Well, we're trying to reproduce what theoretically happened in the suicide of meriwether Lewis.
So we're gonna utilize a ballistic gelatin dummy, or mannequin.
The type of plastic that's being used in the skeleton is the same density as human bone.
It's been covered by a 10% gelatin material that resembles human skin as close as we can get in a forensic laboratory.
But it certainly does represent for us ballistically to fire into to try and reproduce what might have happened in an actual shooting scenario, as in the case of meriwether Lewis.
So we're gonna get to shoot this thing.
Yes, you are.
So, which one of you is gonna shoot the dummy? That would be me.
I'm gonna do that.
Definitely me.
[ Laughs .]
What do you want to do? Rocks, paper, scissors? Shooting competition? We'll have a shoot-off to shoot him.
Whoever gets closest gets to shoot the jelly bastard here.
Okay.
Are we ready? Flintlock and load.
All right.
You hit him right in the head, right in the nose.
[ Laughs .]
You hit him right in the nose.
Whoa! Oh, he's to the left.
Over his shoulder.
You didn't get in the black.
I'm in the target.
I'm in the target.
I'm out.
Aah! That's good, take your time.
Ho! Ho! Aah! [ Laughs .]
Where'd you get him? She got him in the neck! Oh, slightly lower than mine.
You get to shoot him! [ Laughs .]
Well, it's one thing for me to lose to McKinley in shooting.
But for a guy like Scott rolle, trained army reserve, it's got to hurt.
That victory was so sweet.
If you think I let those guys off the hook, you are out of your mind.
[ Laughs .]
Buddy Scott McKinley.
You got it.
You got it.
Nice job.
Fair and square? Thank you, thank you.
All right.
Let's do it.
Uh-oh.
Oh! [ Laughing .]
Oh, my God! He is not looking good.
Look at the stippling on that sucker! Dude! [ Laughing .]
Look at that! You took a chunk out of that guy's head.
Oh, my God.
Bam! Look at that.
Oh, it did not exit the back of his head, though.
So this was the path of least resistance.
At some point -- oh, it deflected.
Yeah.
The whole side of his head is blown out.
That's some serious damage.
Let's go see what happens when you shoot the chest.
Okay.
I'll try and hit it.
Oh, you're gonna hit it.
Here, let me get these on.
She already outshot us.
Thank you.
Live round, full cock, ready to fire.
Oh! Ow! Aah! Right in the heart! No exit wound.
See? So it's in there.
But how far in there? David, as a forensic scientist, do you think there's any way that he could have survived this first shot to the skull? Not in my opinion.
With the amount of damage to the skull, the placement, the brain, it should have been the end right there.
Okay, important details -- it doesn't matter who won the gunfight.
I don't care that McKinley won.
But, one, I should have been the one who shot the dummy -- it's my name above the show.
Two, that gel dummy is the freakiest thing I've ever seen, and I want one.
Think about it, the truth is hidden in plain sight here.
I mean, a bullet fired from that gun at that close range would have killed a man with one shot, much less two.
And then when we did the ballistics tests, there was no exit wound in the back of the skull.
And yet all the reports that we read told us that there was a hole in the back of Lewis' skull.
It didn't make any sense.
With so much physical evidence pointing toward murder, it seemed impossible to me that no one had ever made an official inquiry.
So I actually did some digging, and I found a coroner's inquest that was done in 1996.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott are gonna take a look at it now.
Hi.
Hi, welcome to the Lewis county public library.
We were sent here to look for some information on an inquest that happened in 1996 on the last days of meriwether Lewis.
I have the coroner's transcript here.
This is great.
"Coroner's inquest: The death of meriwether Lewis.
" "1996.
" So this is a coroner's inquest.
I was under the impression a coroner's inquest included a body.
Well, it's a little difficult when the body has been dead for, at the time of the inquest, over 150 years.
Right.
But they got together some of the leading scientists in various fields like psychiatry, forensic science, just various fields, handwriting analysis.
Why would you do handwriting analysis at a coroner's inquest? One of the questions that came up was major Russell's letter 'cause, you know, he was the commanding officer at fort pickering at the time that Lewis arrived in 1809.
This is the guy that nursed him back to health before sending him back on the road? Well, yes.
Russell claimed that Lewis arrived in a deranged state of mind.
And, of course, this is his formal statement saying, you know, "Lewis came here.
He was deranged.
I held him.
He got better, and he died of suicide.
" This is his formal statement.
And one of the interesting things is when they did the analysis, they found out that this was not written by major Russell.
What? Really? No, it wasn't.
So this is a complete fabrication? Yes.
Who do you think did it? Let me be clear.
Thomas Jefferson is one of my greatest heroes.
The man wrote the declaration of independence and never took credit for writing it while he was alive.
And I've been asking myself, "where's Jefferson been this whole time? How could he have just accepted that Lewis killed himself with no questions asked?" This is one of his closest confidants.
It's because Jefferson believed the Russell statement, which said that Lewis was suicidal.
Now we have reason to believe that that document is a fake and that Jefferson himself might have been duped.
And if that's the case, I question everything and start wondering what in the world really happened that day.
Based on what the team's found, we may have uncovered a complex plot to murder meriwether Lewis.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott have been piecing it together, from major James neelly to innkeeper Robert grinder and the mastermind, general James wilkinson.
This was analyzed by a forensic handwriting analyst.
Yes.
It was found to be a forgery.
This was not written by major Russell.
It's not his handwriting.
It's not his signature.
They had several written by him, but this document here was not written by major Russell.
So much rests on this.
Mm-hmm.
This is the reason people think he committed suicide.
It's the reason i thought he committed suicide.
Could this have been a forgery by somebody who was trying to cover up their own involvement? Well, there was a lot at stake.
You want to prove that he died of suicide, then you need someone of an official title to send an official report to make it look nice.
[ Laughter .]
I mean, well -- as nice as suicides can go.
As nice as suicides can be.
There was no inquest.
There was nothing at the time of his death.
We don't know if it was because he was murdered and they're trying to hide it.
So if he was murdered, who do you think did it? Well, the number-one suspect is Robert grinder.
Mm-hmm.
You know, he was the proprietor of the inn, and he was supposed to be away the night that Lewis died.
Lewis' cash that he was carrying turned up missing.
And about that time, Robert grinder came into a large sum of money.
That's convenient for him.
It sort of gives us a motive here, right? One of the more interesting stories is that general James wilkinson was involved in Lewis' murder.
Yeah, this guy keeps coming up, kind of a bad dude.
He was a very powerful man.
In fact, it's super complicated, but there has been a whole book written about the wilkinson conspiracy by a lady named Kira Gale.
Your best bet to get information about wilkinson would be to contact Kira Gale.
Well, if she wrote the book on it, we need to talk to her, right? General James wilkinson is the same guy who conspired with Jefferson's vice-president Aaron burr about overthrowing the government and forming a new country.
Can you say "shady"? And if wilkinson wanted Lewis dead, it wouldn't be hard for him to make it happen.
At this point, the guy's running the U.
S.
army.
When James Madison became president in 1809, the federal government didn't have much power over the states, and they had almost no budget to manage the country.
And that was exactly as the founding fathers had planned it.
But it was a huge problem for Lewis.
He'd over-extended himself under the assumption that he could sell his memoirs for a great deal of money.
And now with his mentor Jefferson gone and congress rejecting the expenses he incurred from governing the Louisiana territory, it left Lewis no choice but to take matters into his own hands and set off on the trail.
This meant that wilkinson had opportunity in neelly and motive due to Lewis taking his job.
We understand that you've got some information about general James wilkinson and his connection to the demise of meriwether Lewis.
I believe that general wilkinson had meriwether Lewis assassinated.
Why do you believe that? Well, he had a reputation as an assassin.
He had been accused of murdering people some times before.
I think wilkinson murdered anybody that stood in his personal way.
General wilkinson was also the first governor of Louisiana territory.
And he was a corrupt governor.
He only lasted a year.
President Jefferson had appointed him.
So when Lewis came back from the expedition, he wasn't in Washington a day before Jefferson said, "would you be the new governor of Louisiana territory?" This guy's out! 'Cause he needed someone he trusted.
Right.
Both: Okay.
So he replaced general wilkinson.
And that would explain some of the bad feeling between wilkinson and Lewis.
Yeah.
The other thing is because Lewis was now governor, he well could have found information that was quite damaging.
Absolutely.
Ah.
And general wilkinson was afraid of him and what he would be carrying to Washington.
And he was on his way to Washington.
Yeah.
When they call someone a renaissance man, it's always hyperbole.
They don't mean it.
But they mean it with Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was the true renaissance man -- successful as an author, farmer, architect, musician, even an inventor.
One of his lesser-known inventions was a cipher that he and Lewis could use for secret communications during Lewis' trip to the Pacific.
The basis was a 200-year-old French system called a trithemius.
The key to the cipher is a word known only to the participants -- in this case, Jefferson and Lewis.
To use it, a page was filled with columns and rows containing the letters of the alphabet.
The far right-hand column featured numbers starting with one and ending with zero.
The key word would then control how letters from the cipher were substituted for letters in the words of the original message.
With the key word, either of the men could easily interpret a message from the other.
And the key word for Lewis and Jefferson? "Artichokes.
" You know what? It sounds like Lewis wasn't depressed.
He was pissed.
Yeah.
You know? [ Laughing .]
That's a good point.
I agree with that.
Kira, we just saw the letter written by Russell that causes a lot of people to believe that meriwether Lewis committed suicide.
But we've been told it's a forgery.
That was established at the coroner's inquest by the F.
B.
I.
Document examiners.
And yet everyone jumped on that and believed it, and there was no substantiation to the attempted suicides? There is none besides that forgery.
We've learned that meriwether Lewis would sometimes communicate with ciphers.
Do you think this had anything to do with his murder? He could have been carrying something in cipher.
If it was particularly sensitive information, I would expect that he would 'cause he was a longtime friend of Jefferson's.
Jefferson was obsessed with codes.
In fact, he came up with one so unbreakable it was used by the U.
S.
army up until World War II.
It was a cipher wheel.
And they say he got the idea from luggage locks.
But what's really fascinating to me and seems most relevant to meriwether Lewis' story are the coded messages that Lewis and Jefferson exchanged ranking the loyalty of military officers so they could downsize the military.
This was dangerous communication, so they devised one of the world's first presidential secret codes.
A list of all ranking officers had a column titled "remarks.
" And Lewis would input secret symbols telling Jefferson whether that officer was to be trusted or not.
This symbol by someone's name, an "x" with two dots, meant the officer was opposed to the administration but was otherwise a respectable officer.
And you know what the very first name on this list was? You got it.
Lewis' Nemesis, general James wilkinson, with the column for remarks conspicuously left blank.
That means "we hate this guy.
" That needed no further mention.
They knew this guy.
They knew his wrath.
And right now, it looks like Lewis may have been on the receiving end of that wrath.
Most people that had sensitive information communicated in ciphers.
So, let me get this straight, in your mind, it's possible that Lewis was hurrying to Washington not only to solve his voucher problem but to potentially get some very important information to Jefferson? Yes.
This whole cipher thing fascinated me.
Maybe wilkinson was afraid of what the ciphers Lewis was carrying with him to D.
C.
said.
I mean, when major neelly arrived with the expedition journals in D.
C.
, they had reportedly been rifled through as if someone had gone through them looking for something.
What if neelly was trying to figure out what Lewis and Jefferson were communicating about? So if we accept that wilkinson had Lewis murdered, how did he actually do it? The innkeeper Robert grinder where he was staying came back and murdered him.
He came into a lot of money, and he moved.
So the question is -- where did he get the money? Right.
Was he paid by wilkinson? Yes.
There's only one man who could have organized it.
So we've got wilkinson the secret Agent connected to assassinations, connected to Aaron burr.
Hang on a second, guys.
It's Tony.
Hey, Tony.
Yeah, it's Scott.
I got that information I talked to you about yesterday.
Seriously? I think this is gonna cast a whole new light on the Lewis case.
I'm across town at the office.
Can you come over? Okay, listen, we're not far.
Wait there.
We'll be right over, okay? All right, great, thanks a lot.
This is potentially amazing.
This is new info.
No one's ever seen it before.
And it's exactly what I was hoping for when we started looking into Lewis' death.
So far, buddy, Mac, and Scott have found out that it doesn't look like meriwether Lewis committed suicide.
From what we can tell, it looks like he was murdered and that the killing might have been covered up by one of the top members of our military.
And now we may have found solid new proof that no one has seen before.
Tony, how are you? Thanks so much for calling.
It's nice to see you again.
Yeah, I've got some pretty exciting news.
Have a seat.
Yeah, Tony, it sounded like it.
How do we know that meriwether Lewis died October 11, 1809? It all comes down to the statement of one man, major neelly.
So I began to do some research into major neelly's life.
And I began to find that there were a lot of lawsuits that were filed against major neelly.
One of those lawsuits was actually tried the day that neelly said Lewis committed suicide.
And I was able to pull the original habeas corpus that required that actual personal appearance of James neelly on the second Monday of October, 1809.
And I also found the appearance bond that James neelly signed, agreeing to be in court on that date.
I was absolutely stunned.
This new evidence proved that major James neelly was in court in Franklin, Tennessee -- that's 60 miles away, 2 days' ride by horse -- when he claimed to have been at grinder's inn writing the letter he sent to Jefferson.
I talked to two independent handwriting experts to see if they agree that this was James neelly's signature.
And they both confirmed the man who signed the letter to Jefferson also signed the documents that were in this court file.
And if he's willing to lie about where he was when meriwether Lewis died, what else might he be lying about? In my experience, when you caught a witness in a lie, it's not the first lie they've told.
This is incredible because that is historical proof of it.
We know now that neelly lied in his letter to Jefferson.
And that's the letter that creates Jefferson's story.
It's the story that Clark hears.
And it's the story that the whole country hears.
That's the letter that really sets the spin on how Lewis died.
We know now there's no credible evidence for suicide.
This may be the key that unlocks the grave, then.
I think it changes history.
Okay, what do we think? Well, we know that turnbow has uncovered brand-new evidence that proves that James neelly was a liar.
Absolutely no credibility on any of this anymore.
And he's the reason for the last 200 years that we've believed that meriwether Lewis committed suicide.
Right.
That's huge because neelly writes the letter to Jefferson that says Lewis committed suicide.
Yeah, and history has hinged on that very letter for 200 years.
And the evidence that turnbow turned up at the courthouse is incredible evidence.
I mean, it's admissible in court.
Two handwriting experts have shown that it was neelly's handwriting and proves definitively that he was not where he said he was.
The whole idea, then, falls apart.
He's the originator of the story.
If he's a liar, we're starting from scratch.
So, what do we know about Lewis? He's a guy who finishes tasks.
He went all the way to the coast and back.
He's on a mission to Washington when he dies.
This is not a guy who's gonna kill himself in the middle of a mission.
Meriwether Lewis was murdered.
His murder was covered up.
And his body needs to be exhumed.
Absolutely.
His family deserves it.
He deserves it.
And our country deserves to know the answer to that.
What buddy, Mac, and Scott have just found out is potentially a rewriting of history.
If the only account of Lewis' suicide comes from a letter written by James neelly and neelly wasn't even at grinder's stand when Lewis died, then neelly's account can't be trusted.
I write cover-up stories, and this as good a cover-up as I've ever seen.
It seems to me we've taken the first steps toward correcting the legacy of an American legend.
But the only way to truly clear Lewis' name is to exhume his body from the dirt of Tennessee.
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