When Catherine Evans died in Chicago at age 81, she left a half-finished letter to a little admirer who had written to ask her about what happened in Ford’s Theatre many decades earlier.

Mrs. Evans was a stock player in “Our American Cousin,” and she was in the theater when John Wilkes Booth shot the president.

Rosalie Smith, superintendent of the nursing home where the actress lived, said Evans told her a dozen times that, if it weren’t for the fact that she had seen Lincoln killed, nobody would ever have known she was alive.

Source: The Baltimore Sun, June 16, 1926