John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln… but who killed John Wilkes Booth?

This is the story Nate Orlowek had learned, too: of a killer’s mad act, his flight from justice, and his small, pathetic death. Even before he’d learned that official story, though, he’d seen The Prisoner of Shark Island, about Dr. Samuel Mudd, who, the film contends, was scapegoated by a vindictive Northern government. After mending Booth’s broken leg on the night of the assassination, Mudd was tried as an accomplice and imprisoned on the titular island.

The film, directed by John Ford, plays fast and loose with history, but even at seven years old, Orlowek says, "I was outraged when I saw what they did to Dr. Mudd, and I had the sense that I wanted to go back in time." Much like the heroes of another favorite story: The Time Tunnel, a sci-fi TV show in which two scientists’ malfunctioning time machine sent them hurtling through history, righting wrongs along the way. In one episode, of course, they foiled an assassination plot against Lincoln.

Even at his youngest, Nate Orlowek had a strong sense of justice and a belief in the mutability of history. The Lincoln assassination became one of his many historical interests. But despite all he read, he never doubted the official story until he was 15. It was August, 1973. He was visiting a friend’s house one afternoon when he noticed a book; its spine bore the familiar presidential silhouette and the title, Web of Conspiracy: The Complete Story of the Men Who Murdered Abraham Lincoln.

David E. George, a drifter who’d poisoned himself with strychnine in the frontier town of Enid, Oklahoma, in 1903. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

He paged through it, flipping to the final illustrated plate. There he saw the familiar face of John Wilkes Booth juxtaposed with a picture of a dead man sitting in a chair. The dead man’s eyes were closed, his face draped with a thick mustache. In the right cast of mind you might see a resemblance between the two, accede that the dapper, 25-year-old star on the right could have sagged and drooped over 40 years to become the swollen, mummified body on the left. And that’s exactly what the book claimed.

"Puzzle for history," it read, introducing the dead man as David E. George, a drifter who’d poisoned himself with strychnine in the frontier town of Enid, Oklahoma, in 1903. As the story went, George had several times confessed to being John Wilkes Booth, even going so far as to admit, "I killed the best man that ever lived." After his grisly, self-inflicted exit from the stage, George’s body was embalmed by the local mortician, who assumed government officials would come to examine it. They didn’t, but the remains became a local attraction, mentioned in newspapers and promoted by civic boosters. A lawyer named Finis L. Bates eventually claimed the body, and later wrote a book, The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, detailing how he’d come to know David E. George, how the man had confessed, and how his tale offered "a correction of history."

As 15-year-old Nate Orlowek held Web of Conspiracy in his hands and gazed into the "puzzle for history," he could see only dimly the story he’d spend the rest of his life pursuing. It was as though a quest had opened before him, this bookishly serious but charismatic young man. He had found not just a puzzle, but an opportunity to set things right. From his father, who had marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, who when watching sports always rooted for the underdog, and who unapologetically believed that one man could save the world — from him Orlowek learned that when something is wrong, you should try to change it. "There are a lot of things that are not the way they’re supposed to be," he says, "and we should not accept things as they are if they’re not the way they’re supposed to be. We should fight to change them."

"A lot of people ask me, ‘Why John Wilkes Booth?’" he says now, looking back, sitting on a couch in the living room of his childhood home in Silver Spring, Maryland. After his parents passed, he moved back here; the coffee table is scattered with papers he’s recovered from his basement, mementos and clippings of his time wandering the lonely labyrinth of counter-history, searching for the truth in a jungle of rumor and misinformation.

Nate Orlowek has spent 40 years investigating whether Booth died in the barn — or escaped to Oklahoma.

Family photographs flank the couch. Behind him, in gold, oval frames, hang line portraits of two young boys: the Orlowek brothers, Nate’s younger self gazing over his shoulder as he speaks. He’s 55 now, thinned by age and time, lightly tinted glasses resting on his nose, yarmulke crowning his head. You could wonder whether it has consumed him, this quest to correct history. But he denies that; says it’s really been a small, if persistent, part of his life. When he warms to the subject he speaks quickly, punctuating his points with a defiantly raised finger, his tales digressive, his facts precise.

So why John Wilkes Booth? "Really, that was what floated by," he says. Like his father he wanted a cause bigger than himself; like his father he wanted to save the world. "I wasn’t able to save the world when I was 15. I wasn’t able to march for civil rights or work Social Security," the institution to which his father devoted his idealistic energies as a lawyer. "But this thing with John Wilkes Booth was a way of doing something that made a difference, something that impacted people."

He took to his cause with the zeal of an idealistic teenager. He recruited friends. He combed archives. When the Library of Congress told him he was too young to do research there, he cornered his senator in an elevator and, soon enough, got his access. Not only that, but he gained entrance to the rare books room.

The media flocked to him. Local television, newspapers, and radio. A lot of radio. And then, in July 1976, Rolling Stone. Tim Crouse’s skeptically supportive feature — opening with the axiom, "The infuriating thing about nut theories is that there’s always that million-to-one shot that an irrefutable piece of evidence is out there somewhere, half-buried, as it were, just waiting for someone to stoop down and dig it up" — lifted the tale to a new strata of attention. Orlowek soon signed on as a consultant for The Lincoln Conspiracy, billed as "a story every American has the right to know."

John Wilkes Booth's diary. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Working on a movie was new and exciting, even if Orlowek clashed with the producers over a fraudster selling the allegedly missing pages of Booth’s diary. But while the finished film, released in 1977, alleged Booth did not die in the barn, it also claimed Lincoln’s own secretary of war had conspired with the head of the Secret Service to kill the president — a plot supposedly revealed in the missing diary pages. Even in a post-JFK assassination, post-Watergate era, with audiences deeply cynical about government, the theory had limited popular appeal. Historians were appalled.

Afterward, Orlowek found himself drifting away from the work. Because what more could he do? Continue digging through history, hoping to find that one irrefutable piece of half-buried evidence? What were the chances of that? He’d done his best, got the story out there. He turned to more tangible goals, petitioning President Carter to clear the name of Dr. Samuel Mudd.

Only after another researcher contacted him a dozen years later, in 1989, did Orlowek again take up his case in earnest. He traveled to Enid, Oklahoma, where locals had tried to interest the wildly popular TV series Unsolved Mysteries in a story about their famous mummy. His zeal renewed, Orlowek signed on to help.

Two years later, the segment aired: a full 20 minutes devoted to the now-mysterious body in the barn. Host Robert Stack solemnly intoned, "Those who question the official account believe that in the confusion following the Civil War, critical evidence may have been mistakenly recorded or perhaps covered up. Other(s) dismiss these theories as revisionist nonsense." Orlowek appeared and summarized The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth. Opposite him, historian James O. Hall cantankerously dismissed this "evidence" as poorly sourced, speculative, or contradicted by more persuasive evidence. He finally scoffed, "I see no mystery about it at all."

But a show called Unsolved Mysteries was unlikely to agree. Instead, a concluding voiceover described Booth’s final interment in an unmarked grave in Baltimore, Maryland’s Green Mount Cemetery. Over an image of the marble stele marking the family plot, Stack pondered, "Perhaps there lies the definitive proof to this unsolved mystery." The implication couldn’t be clearer.

Soon enough, Nate Orlowek reached the next stage of his quest: bringing up the body.

A family affair

Nate Orlowek chose to seize the Booth mystery. Joanne Hulme, however, was born into it. She’s the great-great-great granddaughter of Jane Booth, aunt to John Wilkes Booth. That bloodline meant hearing from an early age that the assassin had escaped Union justice, and that the body buried in Green Mount Cemetery did not belong to her family. The official history was trumped by her family’s story.

Photograph of (left to right) John Wilkes Booth with brothers Edwin and Junius in a production of Julius Caesar.

She first heard about it in the summer before sixth grade, when her mother told her she was being dramatic, just like her relatives. That meant Edwin Booth, and, yes, his brother, John Wilkes Booth, who Hulme until then had known as a presidential assassin, not a distant relative. Her mother warned that she’d be hearing the official story in school, but that the family knew better; Booth had escaped the barn and lived for many, many years. The family had always known it, and Edwin provided money for him.

The news astounded her, but most of the family never talked about their infamous relative, leaving her to ponder on her own. Her mother even forbade discussion with her siblings. But like young Nate Orlowek, Joanne Hulme was interested in history. She’d begun to devour stories about Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, whose entire family was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. For decades afterward, rumors lingered that Nicolas’ youngest daughter, Anastasia, had survived the killings, with several women claiming to be the orphaned princess.

Forensic DNA testing recently identified the remains of the entire royal family, but at the time Hulme connected the "family mystery" of Anastasia’s possible survival to that of her newly discovered relative. She was intrigued, both to know that she belonged to a family of actors and to know the mind of someone who could kill a president. She found a family biography called the The Mad Booths of Maryland and began using stories from it to pry more information out of her relatives. Much of what she heard made her proud, and she tried to share that pride. The assassination was a horrible crime, yes, but John Wilkes Booth wasn’t a monster, she’d argue; the family name shouldn’t be forever marred by his history-changing act. "There’s a massive legacy before that terrible day in April, and there’s a massive legacy afterward," she says. "I wish history were kinder to the talent and the legacy of the Booths."

As for John Wilkes Booth, she heard that after his escape from the barn — where he had stayed, but never been cornered by Union troops — he met up with supporters who spirited him out of the country. He went to Sri Lanka, India, the Hawaiian islands. After four years or so, he returned to the states. Similar stories had long circulated, painting Booth’s supposedly posthumous exploits as those of a swashbuckler, a Reconstruction era Zelig who always found himself among the day’s most interesting world shakers. In the legends, he was a romantic figure: the killer doomed to exile, yet still living an enviable adventure.

Joanne Hulme grew up knowing that there was more to history than the official story. But like Nate Orlowek, there wasn’t much she could do other than tell her story. There was evidence, much of it unpersuasive to skeptics, including almost all historians. ("I think historian is a self-appointed title," she says.) Only after Unsolved Mysteries did another possibility present itself.

After appearing on the show in 1991, Nate Orlowek and his new research partner, Arthur Ben Chitty, a historiographer and professor at the University of the South, were contacted by the Smithsonian Institution. It offered to back an exhumation of whoever was buried in Booth’s grave. There were no dental records, and after almost 130 years, the skeleton was likely to be severely degraded. But with a technique called video superimposition — essentially overlaying a photographic image on an unidentified skull to check for a match — it seemed possible to prove whether the body in Green Mount Cemetery was John Wilkes Booth. As a stage star he’d had hundreds of photos taken. For the superimposition all they needed was a skull.

The Booth descendants at first resisted the idea, but Orlowek’s evidence persuaded many of them. Joanne Hulme’s mother, Virginia Eleanor Humbrecht Kline, signed on to the project, along with Lois W. Rathbun, Booth’s great-great-grand niece. Backed by the Smithsonian, having rallied the family, recruited a young up-and-coming lawyer named Mark Zaid, and with the support of Baltimore’s state’s attorney, by 1994 Orlowek and company would finally know just who was buried in Booth’s grave. Everything was going to plan.

Then the cemetery balked.

Forward into the past

Journalist Ron Rosenbaum once spent some time in Dallas, Texas among JFK assassination buffs — who one might less-charitably call conspiracy theorists. He climbed up the grassy knoll around Dealey Plaza, and even down into the dark bowels beneath the street to look out of a storm drain, lowering himself bodily into one of the many suspected sniper positions. He looked out on Elm Street through a small rectangle of light, gaining just the perspective one buff wanted him to see. It made a handy metaphor for his benevolent skepticism toward the people for whom the assassination, then 25 years gone, now closer to 50, was much more than history. "I want you to know my attitude toward these people," he wrote, "which can be summed up by saying that I’ll go down into the manhole with them but I won’t pull the cover over my head."

But what struck him most about the buffs was not their imaginative ability to fill the plaza with ghostly snipers, or to weave disparate, tenuous facts into coherent if outlandish narratives. It was the quality of their grief. Decades later, they still mourned for a handsome and charismatic young man gunned down in public on a bright November day — a man who also happened to be president. "They are mourners," Rosenbaum wrote. "Their investigation of the assassination is a continuation of his last rites that they can’t abandon. Unlike the rest of us, they haven’t stopped grieving." Their search for a truth could never end, even as it spiraled out to take in more and more of the world. It served the same function as the eternal flame on Kennedy’s grave, keeping his story — a story — in living memory.

Lincoln hasn’t inspired that same sense of personal connection. Whether it’s because he’s receded too far in time to be recognizably human, becoming only an idealized figure of America’s Greatest President, or, conversely, because unlike Kennedy he lived before celebrity culture swallowed politics as it has everything else, providing the (stage-managed, focus-grouped) illusion of intimacy with even the president, Lincoln’s death does not move people to grief. As Secretary of War Edwin Stanton supposedly said upon hearing of Lincoln’s death, "Now he belongs to the ages;" a towering martyr-figure immortalized in Georgia white marble, his words carved into rock around him.

The Monument to Memory of John Wilkes Booth erected by "Pink" Parker..

Booth got his own monument, erected in 1906 by a Confederate veteran in Troy, Alabama. The 3-foot stone read, "Erected by Pink Parker in honor of John Wilks Booth [sic] for killing Old Abe Lincoln." Denied his request to place the monument in front of the local courthouse, Parker instead placed it in his own yard. It was refashioned into his headstone when he died 15 years later.

That may seem anomalous, a trivial historical curiosity. Yet even today, if you visit Booth’s grave in Maryland, you’ll recognize Americans declaring their allegiance. In a corner of the family plot a white footstone rises from the ground. Because it’s unmarked, visitors often assume it’s John Wilkes Booth’s final resting place. On a recent visit, it was covered with pennies, dozens of tiny Abraham Lincoln portraits resting in the sun. They even perched in the family stele, tucked into the center of the double "o" in "Booth." And until recently, if you visited the site of Booth’s death, leaving the highway and traipsing into the overgrown median, you’d find his picture waiting in the woods above a wreath and a black ribbon. There were benches, and in the ground a plaque reading, "Let your peace fall upon the soul of John Wilkes Booth. The Twenty-First Century Confederate Legion." On the plaque lay pennies, placed face down. The picture of a Union preserved but never truly united.

This unfinished past haunts Joanne Hulme; she says the Booth family saga has given her 50 years of angst. She lives in a comfortable artist’s apartment in Philadelphia, where she carries on her mother’s work to prove that John Wilkes is buried in the family plot. She doesn’t want to pass such responsibility on to the next generation. For her, the question is not about correcting history, but setting right the story of her family. "I try to let my siblings know — don’t be like these historians," she says, "Don’t let John Wilkes Booth be the person who has wrecked the legacy of many generations."

Asked whether this recent setback has brought his quest to an end, Nate Orlowek responds, "At every step of the way I felt like the story, had, so to speak, ended, because my goal always was to just do the best I could. The only people who lose are the ones who don’t try." He’s appealing to the public, hoping to put pressure on the National Museum of Health and Medicine. He wants other people to take up the fight. And maybe there are other options: the Mütter Museum’s tissue sample, maybe, or some as-yet-undiscovered non-destructive test. Don’t give up, he says: "In the end we can all win, if we get the truth."

And there’s still that mummy, poor old David E. George. Maybe if it could be found, its DNA could match Edwin Booth’s. But only a few people — maybe no one, actually — knows where the mummy currently rests. After touring the country for decades, it disappeared in the mid-1970s, last seen in Pennsylvania. Rumor has it the mummy belongs to a private collector who’s keeping it a secret, right under Nate Orlowek’s nose. Just another undead piece of American history, ready to rise up again when you least expect it.