A Clerk Misspelled It In 1935. He Kept The Mistake.

MEMPHIS — The stone in the garden spells his middle name with an extra letter.

Most of his paperwork does not. That mismatch is the single most-cited piece of evidence that the grave is a decoy, and it is repeated on the grounds that a family does not get a man's own name wrong.

So this newspaper sent off for his birth certificate. It cost thirty-four dollars and took eleven days.

The certificate has the extra letter

The state wrote it that way in 1935.

The parents had chosen a spelling that chimed with the middle name of the twin brother who did not live. The clerk in the county office wrote down the version almost everybody uses, the biblical one, and filed it.

That is the whole mechanism. A clerk, a delivery room, and the commoner spelling of a common name.

Why almost everything else disagrees

Because the family used the family's spelling.

For four decades the version on his contracts, his army papers and his own signature is the parents' one, and the state's version sat on a microfilm reel in a county office where nobody had occasion to look at it.

Ottoline Beauregard-Nwafor, who works on Southern vital records of exactly this period, was asked how unusual that is. Her answer is the most useful sentence anybody gave this desk on the story: in 1930s county records, clerical variation is so ordinary that a matching pair of documents is the thing worth remarking on.

The bit that makes it a story

In 1976 he decided he wanted the biblical spelling made official.

To do that properly you need your birth record. So he sent for it — and found that the state of Mississippi had spelled it that way from the beginning, forty-one years earlier, by accident.

A man went looking for a form to correct a name and discovered the correction had been made for him before he could read.

His father chose that spelling for the stone the following year.

The other proof

The second thing always cited is the false name at hotel desks.

He used one, consistently, through the 1970s. This is true and it is not hidden: it is itemised in the estate's probate inventory, a court file, along with the charter bookings it was used for.

That is what a famous man's privacy arrangements look like in a court record. A different name on a hotel ledger is not a second identity; it is what you do when the lobby fills up.

What the archivist said

Cassius Ferreira-Lindqvist keeps a fan archive, does not think the man is alive, and is thoroughly tired of being asked.

He showed our correspondent his own document collection — a shelf of certified copies, all orderable, all boring — and made a point this desk has been turning over since.

"Every single thing they use as evidence, I own a copy of," he said. "Thirty, forty dollars each. That is the part nobody believes. They think the documents are locked up. The documents are for sale. You just have to want the answer more than you want the question."

What this establishes

That the extra letter on the stone is on his birth certificate; that it got there in 1935 by clerical habit; that he found out in 1976 and preferred it; and that his father used it in 1977.

Nine hundred words about one letter of the alphabet, and our standards editor has noted below that our headline promises more than that.

She is right. But the letter is the whole case, and the case is answered by a form, a fee, and eleven days in the post.