MANSFIELD — Kati Magda doesn’t remember when or how she became obsessed with Abraham Lincoln, but her fascination with America’s 16th president was far from a childhood phase.
She owns three bookcases of Lincoln biographies. She has posters of him hanging on her walls. She has his signature tattooed on her left bicep.
“I got into Lincoln when I was 9 and it kind of just stuck with me ever since,” she said.
Magda recently graduated from Ashland University with a bachelor’s in history and a minor in political science.
The 21-year-old author recently published her first book — a biography on Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
Magda described “Exploring Booth” as an overview of Booth’s life and career, as well as his psychological state leading up to Lincoln’s murder.
“I wanted to look deeper into like the psychology of it and think, ‘What was his mindset going into it?’ because there’s so many different stories of that night,” she said.
But “Exploring Booth” is more than just a look at the man’s life. It was also a way for Magda to face the darkness in her own.
Not long after developing an interest in Lincoln, Magda watched a documentary on his killer. She spent the next decade terrified. While most children fear monsters, Magda feared John Wilkes Booth. The nineteenth century actor would show up in her nightmares.
Magda said her mother’s then-girlfriend weaponized that fear, frequently bringing up Booth and claiming to be one of his descendants.
“It was something she would always bring up whenever I would get in trouble, which is such a weird thing,” Magda said. “I don’t know anybody who wants to go around bragging about that.”
Despite her terror of Booth, Magda’s interest in history anchored her as she dealt with other challenges. She describes her home life growing up as traumatic. She struggled to focus in school due to undiagnosed ADHD, and as she entered her teens, she experienced periods of depression, anxiety and insomnia — things Lincoln also experienced.
“History’s been the one stable thing in my life,” she said. “I find it therapeutic. It’s an escape.”
Magda began researching Booth as an adult during the pandemic, after a therapist encouraged her to dive deeper into her childhood trauma. During periods of insomnia, she’d pore over history books and Booth’s own writings late into the night.
She became even more disturbed by his apparent narcissism and manipulative tendencies.
“It was not gonna lie. It was kind of scary,” she said. “John Wilkes Booth is kind of like the elephant in the room that you want to ignore. You don’t want to dive any deeper because people like that are weird.
“It kind of just feels like he was haunting me at times.”
Magda started texting her findings to Robert Watson, her mentor and former history teacher at Mansfield Senior High School. He suggested she process the information by writing it all down.
Magda spent close to nine months researching and wrote the book in six months.
“I don’t think he meant to write a book, but that’s what it turned into,” she said.
Much of writing was done between 2 and 4 a.m. At one point, Madga became so engrossed in research and writing that she went two days without sleep.
A few months into her research, a friend recruited her to play John Wilkes Booth in a movie. She agreed.
Magda said she no longer feels afraid or haunted by Booth, but her opinion of him hasn’t softened.
“A lot of people get confused, they think I really like Booth because I sat down and researched him and I wrote a book about him and I played him in a movie,” she said. “I actually hate the guy.”
Her next endeavor as a historian will be pivoting back to the man who started it all. She’s already working on her second book, an exploration of Lincoln’s relationship with religion.
“I don’t want to be known as a Booth historian,” she said. “I want to be known as a Lincoln historian.”
“There’s so many avenues of Lincoln that I want to explore more. I never thought I’d write a book, let alone two books. But here we are.”
“Exploring Booth” is being published by Fulton Books. For more information or to reserve a copy, contact Magda via the book’s Facebook or Instagram pages.
