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Tonight on History's Greatest Mysteries.

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He was the actor whose most famous role was assassinating a president.

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But was John Wilkes Booth also an escape artist?

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I'm Lawrence Fishburne.

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On tonight's mystery, did John Wilkes Booth evade justice and live for decades

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after assassinating Abraham Lincoln?

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There was a son born five years after the assassination.

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John Wilkes Booth could not have died in the barn and fathered his son five years later.

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Did another man die in Booth's place?

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Booth was able to escape and the man in the barn was James Boyd.

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For the first time, Booth descendants share family lore of what they believe is evidence passed down through generations.

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Even list John Wilkes Booth here as Harry Jerome Stevenson's other father.

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Their theories and others will be put to the test, including for the first time Booth family DNA analysis from the autopsy table and the graveyard.

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Where John Wilkes Booth was buried was an issue from the very beginning.

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Suppose John Wilkes Booth actually isn't buried in here.

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The escape of John Wilkes Booth tonight on history's greatest mysteries.

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Music

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John Wilkes Booth before he became John Wilkes Booth the assassinator had a lot going for him.

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He was one of the most popular, if not the most popular actors in North America.

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What's thought of as being the handsomest man in North America.

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I mean he had huge numbers of female fans who swooned over him.

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Music

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He had these eyes that were described as black, a very unusual trait.

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And it's something that seems to sort of draw you in.

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He also had a kind of charisma and power over people which he was able to use in drawing together people for his conspiracy.

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Music

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One of the most difficult things as a historian is to get through to people how different the world was in 1865.

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You've got one half of the country fighting against the other half.

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Washington DC, the nation's capital, is right on the line between the two and it is thoroughly saturated with enemy sympathizers.

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John Wilkes Booth identified himself as a Southerner.

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He was pro-slavery, anti-black, had racist views which were quite common at the time.

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And by the time of the Civil War he identified himself firmly as a Southerner who supported secession and opposed the election of Abraham Lincoln.

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Booth was crushed that the man he thought was a tyrant had been re-elected.

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He hated Lincoln for conquering southern territory and for emancipating the slaves.

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Booth's remedy for the presidential tyrant echoes themes in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a play he'd performed with his brothers.

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Caesar has become a tyrant when Brutus comes along for the good of Rome and kills him.

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There's no doubt that John Wilkes Booth was the man who shot Lincoln at Ford's theater.

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He made certain the audience knew he had played the leading role.

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Booth wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be the American Brutus. He believed he was saving his country.

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Booth pauses at center stage and shouts six simple tyrannous, thus always to tyrants.

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He's saying it in Latin, the language of Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus, making it known that this is what tyrants get. This is justice.

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John Wilkes Booth has just performed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in front of an audience of 1,500 people.

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Then he exits heading for the bridge that will take him from Washington to Maryland.

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Booth crossed the Navy Yard Bridge into Maryland 20 minutes after shooting Lincoln.

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Just over the border, he was joined by 23-year-old David Harrell, the only one of Booth's co-conspirators to escape with him.

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While Booth was assassinating Abraham Lincoln, David Harrell and Lewis Powell were supposed to murder the Secretary of State.

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Powell nearly stabbed him to death in his bed. Harrell was waiting outside for Powell, got afraid.

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The Seward's daughter opened a window and yelled, Help! Murder! Help! He abandoned Lewis Powell at Seward's house.

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David Harrell finally catches up to Booth and then it's the two of them escaping together from that point on.

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Booth and Harrell traveled south for 12 days into Virginia until they reached a barn owned by the Garrett family.

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Most historians believe Booth was killed by Union soldiers in the Garrett's tobacco barn.

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We're in Caroline County, Virginia, about two miles south of the town of Port Royal.

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It doesn't look like a historic site, but as you can see, they put up a sign about John Wilkes Booth's death.

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This is ground zero for one of the greatest crime scenes in history and we have a body, but as usual, the biggest thing we have to do is ID that body.

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Who was pulled out of the barn that night?

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Lori Rothschild on Salty is a journalist and producer. She's teamed with former U.S. martial art, Roderick, who's spent decades tracking down criminal fugitives.

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Lori's handling the family side and I'm more on the technical side.

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Look at it, forensic document examination, medical examiners, autopsies, photographs, forensic photography.

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Looking at some of the conspiracy theories, it really fall more into my lane from having almost 40 years in law enforcement.

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I was actually approached by the family with their story of how they never believed that John Wilkes Booth died at Garrett's farm.

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They had all this information, things that were passed down from generation to generation, things that could never be recorded in history books, that were secrets.

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Joanne Hulme is a descendant of the Booth family. She believes John Wilkes Booth escaped the Union manhunt and lived to father children after 1865.

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The like great-great-grandmother is John Wilkes Booth's aunt.

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And how many siblings do John Wilkes have?

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Ten children born in the United States and four of them died during the Yellow Fever.

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So there's Junius Booth as Booth, the second, Rosalie Booth, Edwin Thomas Booth, Asia Booth Clark, John Wilkes Booth, and then Joseph Adrian Booth.

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I was between 11 and 12 years old and my mother says, so you're going into sixth grade and you're going to study about the Civil War.

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And they're going to tell you that John Wilkes Booth was shot and died in the barn and she said that is not true.

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He escaped the barn, he lived for many years, he had a family.

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That is when my life changed and maybe I think a part of my innocence was lost forever.

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But if Joanne's family lore is right, then accepted history must be rewritten, especially the accounts of what happened that fateful night at Garrett's Farm.

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On April 24th at about 2 p.m. Booth and Harold made contact with a trio of Confederate cavalrymen who accompanied the fugitives as they were ferried across the Rappahannock River.

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Then he's taken to the farm of Richard Garrett.

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Now the Garrets don't know who Booth is, they're told these are Confederates going home, they need your help.

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The first night they're there, the Garrets take them in, they let them sleep in the house.

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The next day a cavalry patrol comes near the Garrets' barn.

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The Garrett family sees Booth and Harold run for cover, so now they're thinking what have these men done?

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They tell them you can't sleep in the house tonight, you've done something, you can sleep in our tobacco barn.

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Right.

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But they don't realize as soon as they go inside and go to bed, the Garrets lock them into the tobacco barn.

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Most historians say Booth and Harold were locked in the tobacco barn and couldn't escape when Union troops arrived.

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When soldiers set fire to the barn to smoke them out, Harold gave himself up.

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Moments later Booth was shot, dragged from the flaming barn and later died.

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But Joanne Hulme doubts that account.

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There's hundreds and hundreds of books talking about a tobacco barn.

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I don't understand why historians then question this more.

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Tobacco barn is made for drawing tobacco, it's not made for keeping people in.

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Any one of us could escape from a tobacco barn without detection.

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This is a frame circa 1900 or so tobacco shed.

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So what's the difference between a tobacco shed and a tobacco barn?

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Geographically basically, they call tobacco buildings different in different areas, but this is basically a shed here.

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And it has these vertical ventilators here that help dry out the product inside.

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But in around April, the end of April in Virginia, the barn would have been cleaned out at that point.

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By a few months.

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Can a human be locked into a tobacco barn?

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Are those slots very heavy to move?

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Couldn't they just kick it out or push it out from the inside?

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They're relatively easy to pivot on their hinges.

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We see a couple different attachments here to kind of secure this.

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You've got the wooden slat that spins on one nail.

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If you're trying to get out, that looks like a pretty easy way to...

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But the thing of it is, when you have 25 vertical ventilators or something like that, some maybe half open.

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It's like a shutter on a house.

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Structurally, it's not made to keep anybody in.

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No George, it's not made.

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It's not a jail.

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Yeah, exactly.

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You've got two desperate fugitives there on the run, obviously from one of the most heinous crimes ever done in the United States up until that point in time.

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They're in the barn, they're aware that there's union troops are coming down the road.

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They probably got about 10, 15 minutes to figure out what the heck to do.

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If they're locked in here, do you think they could have got out of this?

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Yes, my own opinion, yes.

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So why wouldn't the most wanted men in the country simply push their way out of that tobacco barn?

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It's the first of many questions about what truly happened to John Wilkes Booth.

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12 days after assassinating President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was locked in a tobacco barn at the Garrett farm with co-conspirator David Harold.

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When Union cavalry set a fire to smoke them out, Harold surrendered, but Booth was shot, dragged from the burning barn and later died.

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Case closed, justice served. Or was it?

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My cousins grew up with the same story that John Wilkes Booth was not the body in the barn.

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Some Booth family members believe John Wilkes was not the man killed that night at Garrett's farm, and they cite various reasons.

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There's the enduring claim that as David Harold surrendered, he said that the man in the barn was not Booth.

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And the fact that, at the official autopsy, Dr. John Frederick May, the man brought in to identify the body, did not recognize it as Booth's.

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That's significant to Dr. Robert Arnold, who has written about the assassination.

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When May first saw the corpse, he said, that's not Booth, and I have no reason to believe this could ever be the man.

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But if John Wilkes Booth escaped, where did he go? According to Booth family lore, he reunited with a woman named Martha Isola, someone they believe was his wife.

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Author Troy Cowan, who wrote a book about Isola, agrees.

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Historians have ignored the marriage to John Wilkes Booth because they kept it a secret and nobody knew about it.

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Some members of the Booth family believe Booth and Martha Isola had a daughter named Ogirita.

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Ogirita was born nine months after they were married in 1859.

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As the story goes, after the assassination, Booth and Martha Isola set sail for India, leaving their daughter behind.

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After a very short stay, they decided to return to the United States.

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That is what some Booth family members and others believe.

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There is evidence that Martha Isola did get married, but not to Booth.

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According to court records, she married a man named John Stevenson in 1871.

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The couple had a son named Harry Jerome Stevenson.

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But according to Booth family lore, that marriage was a cover story to conceal the fact that Harry Jerome Stevenson's real father was John Wilkes Booth.

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Is that accepted that it was John Wilkes Booth's child?

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In our family and among historians that are not just going by the general accepted history.

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This story was published in a 1937 book by Ogirita's daughter, Isola Forrester, Harry Jerome Stevenson's niece.

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Thirty years earlier, a Tennessee lawyer named Finis Bates had written a different account of Booth's life as a fugitive.

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According to Bates, Booth made his way west where he died in Enid, Oklahoma in 1903 under the alias David E. George.

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To investigate these different accounts, the team will examine critical evidence and conduct DNA testing on some possible Booth family members.

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It's a process familiar to former U.S. Marshal Art Rodrick.

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There's been so many books written about John Wilkes Booth.

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You could spend your lifetime actually wading through all the different conspiracy theories.

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And what we always try to do from the law enforcement perspective is boil it down to the facts.

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The hunt for facts continues at the place where Lincoln was assassinated.

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We're in Ford's Theater on 10th Street in Washington.

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This is the place where President Lincoln came on the night of Good Friday, April 14th, 1865.

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The previous Sunday, Robert E. Lee had surrendered to General Grant and the city had been celebrating all week long.

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Mary Lincoln decided to celebrate that evening by attending the popular comic play Our American Cousin.

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The president in a joyous mood agreed to join her.

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It wasn't so much the play, it was joining in the celebration of the end of the war.

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But in the closing months of the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth had orchestrated an evolving plot against the president.

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John Wilkes Booth's first plot against Abraham Lincoln was not to murder him, it was to kidnap him.

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He could use Lincoln as a captive to force the North to surrender all the Confederate prisoners of war.

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In the fall of 1864, Booth drew a group of associates into his kidnapping plot.

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But on the 18th of January, 1865, the Union government agreed to resume prisoner exchanges with the South.

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There was no longer any reason to capture Abraham Lincoln and force them to do what in fact they were already doing.

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Booth was very disappointed.

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He thought he could perform this master stroke where he'd become part of history and change history.

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Then on April 3rd, Richmond fell.

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Then news got even worse for Booth.

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On April 9th, Robert E. Lee surrendered at Epimax.

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He thought the cause was lost.

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When John Wilkes Booth woke up in the morning of April 14th, 1865, he did not know that he was going to assassinate Abraham Lincoln that night.

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He went to Ford's Theater to pick up his mail.

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One of the theater employees told Booth that Abraham Lincoln is planning to be here tonight.

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That started the ticking clock and Booth said, maybe there's still time for me to act.

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So Booth ticked off in his head. Who's still in town?

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Lewis Powell is still here.

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George Atzerot is here.

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David Harrell is here.

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We can do it.

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He starts making plans not only for an attack on the president, but also possibly the vice president and certainly the secretary of state, William Seward.

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That afternoon, Booth arrived at Ford's Theater during rehearsal.

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He went into the vestibule behind the presidential box, taking with him a piece of wood from a music stand that he'd later used to barricade the door.

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Once he put that bar in place, no one could follow him into Abraham Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater.

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The play began around eight o'clock that night, and John Wilkes Booth dropped in from time to time, looking at the clock and the lobby and so on.

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He went next door and had a drink, and he had a kind of a last minute get together with Lewis Powell and possibly George Atzerot.

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He needed to make sure his pistol was ready.

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He decided to use a single shot Derringer pistol.

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Maybe Booth thought it was, in his twisted mind, more honorable to take Lincoln with a single coup de gras, like a hunter.

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Lincoln's entrance to Ford's Theater was majestic in its simplicity.

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He arrived with no entourage, no armed guards.

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We think of security of the president today. It's completely different than the way it was back then.

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There was no security detail around the president all the time, like we see now with what the Secret Service is.

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Lincoln did have a detail with him that evening from the Metropolitan Police Department.

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More than likely, the two main responsibilities he had at most was to meet the president at the door when he arrived at Ford's, get him to his box.

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Once the play was over, then get him from the box back to this street.

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Even in a city where you have the vast majority of people are pro-southern, they still didn't think it was necessary that you protect the president.

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William Seward once said, oh, assassination, it's not an American habit or custom. That's not going to happen here.

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So John Wolk's Booth came back in here about 10 o'clock. He comes to the back of the theater and calls out to Ned Spangler.

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He wants Spangler to hold his horse for him. Spangler says, I'm busy, I'm here working, and so he refuses.

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So then Booth gets this young boy by the name of Joseph Burroughs to hold the horse's reins for him.

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And then he goes inside. Booth is about ready to go into that final stretch.

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Booth's path pretty much followed the perimeter of the building, very similar to the path that Lincoln had taken.

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Oftentimes, people may be asked questions of why on earth would you have let John Wolk's Booth access the president? Why would you not have?

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Today, you see celebrities hanging out with politicians, very similar in 1865 as well.

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One thing I find interesting about Booth is if he just wanted to kill the president, he could have been sitting back there with a Civil War-era rifle,

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making a shot from that distance across the theater would have been a pretty easy shot with a rifle.

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Yeah, but then there would be a chance that somebody else would get credit.

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So this is a door leading to the vestibule that would have then led to the actual presidential box. Booth more than likely gets here during the third act scene two of Our American Cousin.

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And he knows when he wants to fire the shot because he's familiar with the play and it's going to be a big burst of laughter and all of that.

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So Booth makes his way into the vestibule here, then closes the door behind him, picking up the broken music stand that he had placed earlier,

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and then wedges the door shut. He is waiting outside the box. You can see through the hole.

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Through that hole, you could see the top of the president's rocker and the president's head.

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He's in a really imperfect position for just simply walking in and firing the shot.

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Major Henry Rathbone, here's the shot, smells the sulfury gunpowder, realizes something has just happened.

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Booth drops the derringer, pulls out his nine-inch dagger, lunges at Rathbone.

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Rathbone is stingly throwing up his left arm, catching the blade.

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The audience was stunned and didn't understand what was going on.

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Booth got to the front rail and vaulted over, landing down on the stage. That's 12 and a half feet down.

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Booth lands unevenly on the stage and breaks a bone in his left leg.

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And after a few seconds, Mrs. Lincoln screamed and John Wilkes Booth ran off the stage and went out the back door where Joseph Burroughs was waiting with his horse.

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According to some, what happened in the ensuing hours and days didn't play out the way history books say it did.

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As President Lincoln liked dying in a boarding house across the street from Forge Theatre, his assassin fled through northern Maryland, headed for a tavern owned by Mary Surrutt.

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Booth would have felt comfortable in Maryland and Virginia because they were slave states, and so I think it would have been seen as a haven for any Southern sympathizer.

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Surrutt's tavern was indeed a haven for those with Southern sympathies.

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Former U.S. Marshal, Art Rodrick, met with author James L. Swanson to retrace fugitive Booth's known steps.

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So James, here we are at Surrutt's tavern, why don't you tell me what happened here in April of 1865?

221
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A little after midnight, Gen. Booth and David Harrell rode up to this tavern, and Booth didn't want to dismount because of his broken leg.

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David Harrell got off his horse, knocked on this door, and told the tavern keeper to come down and let them in.

223
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Booth knew he was coming here. It was always part of his plan.

224
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Earlier that day, he stopped at Mary Surrutt's boarding house in Washington, D.C.

225
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She was the mother of John Surrutt Jr., one of Booth's conspirators in the kidnapping plot.

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Booth handed her his binoculars, and he said, Mary, can you take these to your country tavern and tell the innkeeper, John Lloyd, that people are coming tonight and I want to pick up my guns.

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Earlier, as part of the kidnapping plot, Booth had left two Spencer repeating carbines here. They were hidden behind a wall. Cleverly, they were suspended on ropes, so you'd have to look down and see that the carbines were down there.

228
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Now we don't know if Booth told Mary that I'm stopping there after I've killed the president and I want my guns.

229
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He probably only told her I'm passing through town, I'm going to pick up the binoculars and tell Lloyd the innkeeper to get those guns ready.

230
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Lloyd told David Harreld, wait here, I'll get the guns.

231
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Then Booth said to Lloyd, there's some news if you'd like to hear it.

232
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And Lloyd said, I'm not particular about it, tell me if you want.

233
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And Booth unbelievably confessed. The actor couldn't resist boasting about what he had done.

234
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He said, I'm pretty certain that we've assassinated the president because he wasn't sure. He did not know yet if he had succeeded. He didn't know if it was a fatal wound.

235
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It sounds like the assassination plot was done kind of on spur of the moment. The planning was done for the kidnapping as opposed to the assassination.

236
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Booth still knew where the safe houses were. He knew the names of Confederate operatives and agents. But he had one big advantage when he got here.

237
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He was riding ahead of the news. Nobody in Maryland knew that Abraham Lincoln did the shot. They didn't want to stay here long because Calvary was going to come out of Washington searching the countryside.

238
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And then Booth and Harreld rode off into the night.

239
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The traditional story says that Booth and Harreld rode from Sirot's Tavern to the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd. Booth was badly in need of medical attention.

240
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From Washington to Mudd's house, he was 25 to 30 miles. And Booth had broken his ankle when he fell onto the stage.

241
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In riding a horse, you use your legs sort of as shock absorbers. He couldn't do that. And he had to bounce along. And by the time he got to Mudd's, his back was killing him.

242
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But Dr. Mudd's statements about Booth's visit suggest it might not have been David Harreld traveling with Booth, but a younger man named Edwin Hinson, shown in this photo.

243
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In testimony, Dr. Mudd gave to Union authorities. He said Booth's accomplice gave his name as Hinson.

244
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Mudd stated he had seen the photograph of Harreld, but did not recognize it as that of the young man.

245
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In another statement, Mudd described Hinson as a well-grown boy who looked to be about 17 or 18, a boy who had never yet shaved.

246
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That's a far better description of Edwin Hinson than the 23-year-old Harreld, whose ample five o'clock shadow can be seen in photos taken after his capture.

247
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If Booth was traveling with Hinson, then is it possible Booth wasn't at Garrett's farm with Harreld, and that he wasn't the man who died there?

248
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That's what some Booth family members believe, and they point to the possibility that Booth fathered children after the history books say he died.

249
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To help find the truth, Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, a noted forensic genealogist, agreed to undertake DNA testing of some Booth family members.

250
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So I've been contacted by one of the Booth family members. Her name is Joanne Yolm, and she has documentation showing her lineage.

251
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Can we possibly use Joanne's DNA to prove or disprove whether or not these people are descendants?

252
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Well, that's where genetic genealogy comes in. Forensic genealogy is the application of scientific methods of genealogy.

253
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In an informal sense, it's known as CSI meets roots.

254
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Fortunately, we have the ability to take DNA tests as genealogists to prove family lines or to disprove family lines,

255
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and so we no longer have to rely on family stories and documentation that may not have provenance.

256
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Now, when you test Joanne, the whole point really is to compare her to some people that might be Booth's, but are not sure.

257
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When we want to compare, I'll call them the maybe Booth against authentically documented Booth.

258
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Joanne is a candidate because she descends from John Wilkes Booth's paternal aunt.

259
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This whole project actually comes down to DNA. We're sitting in a time where history and science are going to merge together.

260
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Among the possible descendants of John Wilkes Booth is Andy Gordo, whose great-great grandfather is Harry Jerome Stevenson,

261
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a man allegedly fathered by Booth after Booth was supposed to be dead.

262
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At left, Mrs. Joseph Bala, the former Isola Francis Stevenson, who was searched, John Wilkes Booth was her grandfather.

263
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At right, Mrs. Isola Martha Stevenson, who, Mrs. Bala says, married assassin of President Lincoln in Connecticut in 1864.

264
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So this would be Isola Martha Mills.

265
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That's my mother's mother, actually.

266
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This is your mother's mother.

267
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Yes.

268
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Got it.

269
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And then her father would have been Harry Jerome Stevenson.

270
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Yes.

271
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You've given your sample for the DNA testing, which is exciting.

272
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It is.

273
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The only thing I get really concerned about is at the end of the day, it's going to come down to science.

274
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We're going to come up with an answer.

275
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And are you guys ready to face that answer?

276
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Oh, definitely.

277
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It's just being nice to know.

278
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It'd be nice to vindicate my mother and grandmother, you know, and shed some light on really what happened.

279
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Five and a half hours after John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln, he arrived at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd with a broken leg.

280
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Relying on statements Dr. Mudd gave to Union officers after his arrest, some theorize that Booth was accompanied by a young man named Edwin Ensign.

281
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But most historians, like James Swanson, maintain that Booth was traveling with conspirator David Harreld.

282
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Booth stayed in this horse right about here, about 20 paces from the house.

283
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David Harreld dismounted and pounded on the front door until he woke Dr. Mudd.

284
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Mudd shouted through the door, who is it?

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What do you want?

286
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Harreld said, well, from around here, I'm with a friend, his horse fell, he's got a broken bone, he needs help.

287
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Mudd came out to help the injured man off the horse.

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And that's when Dr. Mudd knew it.

289
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This is John Wilkes Booth.

290
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This wasn't Booth's first visit to this house.

291
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He'd spent the night here.

292
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He had come down to this county and met with Dr. Mudd and other Confederate operatives.

293
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Mudd was part of Booth's plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln.

294
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Dr. Mudd did not know that John Wilkes Booth was going to assassinate Abraham Lincoln that night.

295
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Well, after Dr. Mudd helped John Wilkes Booth come through the front door, he took him into this room, the front parlor.

296
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And Mudd set him on the sofa.

297
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He didn't even take him up to his office.

298
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So Booth reclined on that sofa and Dr. Mudd began to help him.

299
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On that actual sofa?

300
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That sofa.

301
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That sofa right there?

302
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Yes.

303
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Mudd knew he had to get Booth's left boot off, but it wouldn't come off.

304
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He tried to yank it off and it caused Booth agonizing pain.

305
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So he cut the boot open and pulled it off his leg.

306
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He detected that he had a simple fracture.

307
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Easy enough to treat.

308
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Dr. Mudd left Booth on the sofa and he went upstairs fashion to splint.

309
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And then Dr. Mudd knew that Booth was going to need crutches.

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And so he made a pair of crutches here.

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He invited him to spend the night and took him upstairs to the front bedroom where Booth rested for several hours.

312
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David Harreld came down for breakfast, but Booth didn't want food.

313
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He just stayed upstairs till at least around noon.

314
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They spent quite a few hours here then.

315
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They did.

316
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They got here at 4 a.m. and they were here till the following evening.

317
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And during his stay here, he asked for a razor and shaving cream and he shaved his mustache off.

318
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So this is where he cleaned up quite a bit?

319
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This is where he cleaned up and changed his appearance.

320
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And changed his appearance, exactly.

321
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Knowing it would be painful for Booth to ride a horse, Dr. Mudd and David Harreld searched for a carriage.

322
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But none were available.

323
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Harreld returned to the farm and Dr. Mudd rode on to Bryantown where he saw Union cavalry

324
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and learned that President Lincoln had died that morning, killed by John Wilkes Booth.

325
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He didn't tell the soldiers.

326
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He rushed back here to tell John Wilkes Booth, what have you done?

327
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You've implicated me. You've endangered me and my family.

328
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You've got to go. I'll protect you.

329
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I won't tell them you were here.

330
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But you have to leave right now. You can't be found here.

331
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John Wilkes Booth knew the cavalry was just a few miles away in Bryantown,

332
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but he felt safe and familiar on this spot.

333
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But once Mudd sent him down that road to the great Sakaya Swamp, he was heading into territory unknown to him.

334
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From the time John Wilkes Booth left Dr. Mudd's farm, he had to make it up as he went along.

335
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This is an individual that almost commits a perfect crime, but because he broke that bone on his leg,

336
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he started to have to improvise and that's where these criminals always go wrong.

337
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That's right.

338
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Hobbling on crutches, Booth pressed on, determined to elude the spreading Union dragnet.

339
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When he left Mudd, he then connects with Thomas Jones, an agent who specializes in faring spies and agent across the river here.

340
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And Jones gave him the most important advice that Booth got during the entire escape.

341
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Jones said the cavalry's going to be close.

342
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I suggest we hide in place, wait for the Union forces to sweep through the area and move on past us.

343
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For five days, Booth and Harold hid in the pine thicket, waiting for a chance to cross the Potomac River into Virginia.

344
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They finally crossed into Virginia on April 24th.

345
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There they met three Confederate soldiers and were ferried across the Rappahannock by William Rollins.

346
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The soldiers then guided them to Garrett's farm.

347
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Now Rollins is still in the same place the following day when pursuers from the 16th New York Cavalry come along.

348
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And he says, yeah, they were here about 24 hours ago.

349
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Willie Jett is one of the soldiers who is with them.

350
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You can go ask Willie, everybody knows where he is because he's got a girlfriend down in Bowling Green, Virginia.

351
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And they pull Willie out of bed and Colonel Everton Conger puts a gun to his head and says, we know that you were with Booth.

352
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So Willie Jett tells them, I left him at the Garrett farm.

353
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The Union soldiers returned with Jett to Garrett's farm and surrounded the barn where Booth and Harold were hiding.

354
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When the fugitives wouldn't surrender, soldiers set fire to the barn.

355
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After Harold gave himself up, a sergeant named Boston Corbett saw Booth move toward the door holding a rifle and shot him through the neck.

356
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Dr. Robert Arnold disputes that account.

357
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A Navy surgeon for 30 years and an assistant county coroner, he was inspired to write his own book about the Lincoln assassination.

358
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There was a little journal published by the Navy and there was an article about the autopsy of the man that was killed in Garrett's barn.

359
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And it questioned the identification of the corpse.

360
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That article by Leonard Guthridge is among the Neff Guthridge papers housed at Indiana State University.

361
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A collection like this is often labeled a conspiracy collection.

362
00:34:44,000 --> 00:34:47,000
In fact, it is not a conspiracy collection.

363
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It's a collection of research materials and it can be interpreted different ways by different researchers.

364
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Dr. Arnold joined Art Rodrick at Indiana State to share his theory about the corpse at Garrett's farm.

365
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Central to his argument are three vertebrae that were removed from Booth's body during his autopsy aboard a Navy gunboat, the USS Montauk.

366
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The vertebrae are now kept at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland.

367
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I finally went to the medical museum to look at the actual specimen to see the vertebra from the corpse that was on the Montauk.

368
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This looks like a picture from the medical museum I know you had talked about. You actually saw this.

369
00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:40,000
Yes, this is the three vertebrae that the pathologist removed and it shows the downward inclination of the bullet.

370
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That's the trajectory which I measured out at 20 degrees. This is almost one vertebra lower here.

371
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You're saying a shot from a higher up angle.

372
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Yes.

373
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Since Boston Corbett was a short man standing on the ground, Dr. Arnold believes he could not have fired the deadly shot from overhead.

374
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Boston Corbett could not have killed a man in the barn. Corbett would have had to be 18 feet in the air to have fired that.

375
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Trajectories don't lie, people do.

376
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Dr. Arnold also points out issues surrounding Dr. Frederick May's role in the autopsy.

377
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A highly regarded surgeon, Dr. May had removed an infected grove from the back of Booth's neck two years earlier.

378
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He was brought aboard the Montauk to identify Booth's body.

379
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You were a pathologist. I mean, Dr. May was a surgeon. I don't know how many times he would come across a body that was into decomposition.

380
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He would ordinarily never do that, especially with surgery. He said this man does not resemble John Wilkes Booth.

381
00:36:41,000 --> 00:36:47,000
But the most interesting thing to me is when he said his right leg was black from a fracture.

382
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Now, May is smart enough to know that a fracture does not cause your leg to turn black. That's soft tissue.

383
00:36:54,000 --> 00:37:04,000
The injury that Booth received on the stage, and it was corroborated by Dr. Mudd, was a simple fracture two inches above the end step.

384
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But Mudd did not describe any soft tissue damage whatsoever. He even noted the lack of tummification, which is swelling.

385
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Yet the corpse on the Montauk had enough soft tissue damage that it had turned black.

386
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Dr. Arnold notes that Dr. May indicated the body had an injured right leg. Booth fractured his left leg.

387
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And his son said if he said it was the right leg, it was the right leg. He didn't make those kind of mistakes.

388
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For these reasons, Dr. Arnold makes a bold assertion.

389
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The man that May saw on the Montauk could not possibly have been the same one that broke his ankle on the stage and that Mudd saw.

390
00:37:51,000 --> 00:38:01,000
Some believe the description of John Wilkes Booth's dead body by Dr. Frederick May raises questions about who actually died in Garrett's barn.

391
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They point to an article Dr. May wrote years later about the autopsy aboard the USS Montauk, in which he states that at first he didn't recognize the body as Booth's.

392
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To further investigate that autopsy, Art Roderick met with Graham Hettrick. A coroner for three decades, Hettrick has conducted more than 3,000 autopsies.

393
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They examined the report by the Army surgeon who actually conducted the autopsy.

394
00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:40,000
This here is a statement by the Surgeon General Barnes. I made it 2 p.m. this date, April 27th, a post-mortem examination of the body of J. Wilkes Booth.

395
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:50,000
The left leg and foot were encased in an appliance of splints and bandages upon the removal of which a fracture of the fibula was discovered.

396
00:38:50,000 --> 00:39:04,000
The cause of death was a gunshot wound in the neck, the ball passing through the bony bridge of the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae, severing the spinal cord, paralysis of the entire body was immediate,

397
00:39:04,000 --> 00:39:12,000
and all the horrors of consciousness of suffering and death must have been present to the assassin during the two hours which he lingered.

398
00:39:12,000 --> 00:39:29,000
His description of the person being totally aware is true because he has the capacity of thought. He is paralyzed and he was dying really of asphyxiation because the diaphragm and not being able to move to help with the breathing.

399
00:39:29,000 --> 00:39:40,000
The overall autopsy was not what we expect today. There would probably be a hundred autopsy photos. They had a photographer there but there was only one plate.

400
00:39:41,000 --> 00:39:54,000
That one photo has never been seen, fueling conspiracy theories ever since, especially since one of the primary purposes of the examination was to make a positive identification of Booth's body.

401
00:39:54,000 --> 00:40:06,000
None of Booth's family members or co-conspirators were present to ID the body, but Dr. John Frederick May was, and May's initial reaction was that the body did not resemble Booth.

402
00:40:06,000 --> 00:40:16,000
I'm not surprised that he said this doesn't even look like a likeness of Mr. Booth because you have somebody who's been running through the swamps in the woods, he hasn't been eating regularly, he hasn't been sleeping.

403
00:40:16,000 --> 00:40:22,000
He probably didn't look like that handsome actor that May was used to seeing in Ford's Theater.

404
00:40:22,000 --> 00:40:30,000
He died approximately at 5.30 a.m. on April 26th. The tenet d'ority sewed him into the blanket at around 8.30.

405
00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:43,000
The wrapped body was placed face down in a horse cart and taken to the Potomac River where it traveled by boat to the Washington Navy Yard and was brought aboard the Montauk.

406
00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:46,000
The autopsy did not start till 2 p.m.

407
00:40:46,000 --> 00:40:53,000
Wow, there's a lot of post-mortem changes going on there. The first one, you get an o-rigin mortis, you're stiffen.

408
00:40:53,000 --> 00:41:03,000
Another one simultaneously to that is called levidity. If you're laying somebody face down, that blood is going to go towards the face during decomposition.

409
00:41:03,000 --> 00:41:17,000
By the time they got him, his face probably didn't look too good. It could be deceiving. But Dr. May, looking at the back of the neck, did say that although it isn't what I would consider a likeness of him, that is the scar.

410
00:41:17,000 --> 00:41:20,000
It's consistent with what I did.

411
00:41:21,000 --> 00:41:30,000
The Schlesinger Library at Harvard University holds the personal papers of Isola Page Forester, a celebrated author.

412
00:41:30,000 --> 00:41:38,000
Her 1937 book, This One Mad Act, tells a story in which Booth was not the dead man on the Montauk.

413
00:41:38,000 --> 00:41:44,000
Forester believed she was the granddaughter of John Wilkes Booth and Martha Isola Mills.

414
00:41:44,000 --> 00:41:56,000
Based on all of the writings that we're finding in here of all these letters, it's pretty clear that Isola Mills, or Martha Isola Mills, was married to John Wilkes Booth.

415
00:41:56,000 --> 00:41:59,000
Is that something that has always been known?

416
00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:10,000
Always in our family and all the generations and all the different branches. Always known, always accepted, always acknowledged, talk of the deed of when they were married.

417
00:42:10,000 --> 00:42:22,000
And while historians see no convincing evidence of that marriage, Joanne Hume believes the proof exists in a document written by the minister who is alleged to have officiated their wedding.

418
00:42:22,000 --> 00:42:29,000
What it looks like is a marriage certificate that was stated January 9, 1859 by Reverend Weaver.

419
00:42:29,000 --> 00:42:41,000
This is to certify that on January 9, 1859, I performed a ceremony joining in Holy Matrimony, John Byron Wilkes Booth and Martha Mills at my home in Dingelton, Connecticut.

420
00:42:41,000 --> 00:42:45,000
And there's a further shocking revelation in This One Mad Act.

421
00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:53,000
There's an historic record of Martha I.M. Booth marrying John Stevenson in Baltimore in 1871.

422
00:42:53,000 --> 00:43:07,000
But Forrester's book claims Martha Isola's marriage to Stevenson was an arrangement to cover for Booth's escape and to conceal the identity of Booth's newborn son, Harry, by giving him Stevenson's name.

423
00:43:07,000 --> 00:43:15,000
One Mad Act refers to his conversation that Harry has with his father at the end of his father's life. His father is dying.

424
00:43:15,000 --> 00:43:26,000
According to Forrester, the man Harry believed was his father confessed that Harry was really the son of his friend, John Wilkes Booth.

425
00:43:26,000 --> 00:43:34,000
You can't father a child, you know, five years after you have been dead.

426
00:43:34,000 --> 00:43:40,000
There are plenty of stories about John Wilkes Booth having children, being married.

427
00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:47,000
I can believe that he probably got a woman pregnant. I would find it hard to believe that he never did.

428
00:43:47,000 --> 00:43:59,000
But as for the marriage, I'm very skeptical about it. Now in this age of genealogy done through DNA, I'm expecting we'll see an answer before too long.

429
00:44:04,000 --> 00:44:17,000
A critical step in investigating whether John Wilkes Booth escaped after killing President Lincoln and fathered a son named Harry Jerome Stevenson is the DNA testing of Harry Jerome Stevenson's descendants.

430
00:44:17,000 --> 00:44:23,000
Dennis Farley and his sister Linda Casey are the great-grandchildren of Harry Jerome Stevenson.

431
00:44:23,000 --> 00:44:29,000
The official historical record says that Harry was the son of Martha Isola and John Stevenson.

432
00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:35,000
But Dennis and Linda recall learning that their ancestors' father was really John Wilkes Booth.

433
00:44:35,000 --> 00:44:42,000
We were all at my grandmother's house. I think it was Joanne Gordo who started telling people, you know, we're related to John Wilkes Booth.

434
00:44:42,000 --> 00:44:48,000
Of course, most of us didn't believe it, but my grandmother's house just dropped because she never wanted the story to get out.

435
00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:54,000
She thought people would take retribution on the family. She asked people to just keep it within the family.

436
00:44:54,000 --> 00:45:01,000
And this would have been Harry Jerome Stevenson's daughter. Did you guys ever know of John Henry Stevenson?

437
00:45:01,000 --> 00:45:07,000
Uncle Tom was the one that told us that this man Stevenson took the kids under his name.

438
00:45:07,000 --> 00:45:10,000
So that they could mask the identity again of the child.

439
00:45:10,000 --> 00:45:17,000
Yeah, we did hear that Stevenson was a convenience thing to help with her and the child.

440
00:45:17,000 --> 00:45:25,000
And you never heard of the story of Martha Isola meeting John Wilkes Booth in California and taking a boat to India.

441
00:45:25,000 --> 00:45:28,000
I didn't hear about the boat trip.

442
00:45:28,000 --> 00:45:35,000
In that story, they go to India with John using an alias John Byron Wilkes.

443
00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:38,000
There's a will that was created in India.

444
00:45:38,000 --> 00:45:44,000
Those who believe Booth escaped to India cite, as proof, the will of John Byron Wilkes.

445
00:45:44,000 --> 00:45:48,000
A certified copy of the will was found in Clay County, Indiana.

446
00:45:48,000 --> 00:46:01,000
The unsigned will apparently executed in Bombay in 1883 gives sums of money to wives, lovers, and heirs of my body, known to be associated with Booth.

447
00:46:01,000 --> 00:46:04,000
And in that, Harry Jerome Stevenson is listed.

448
00:46:04,000 --> 00:46:06,000
Ogarita is also listed.

449
00:46:06,000 --> 00:46:08,000
Isola is listed.

450
00:46:08,000 --> 00:46:10,000
Well, whether it's all true or not.

451
00:46:10,000 --> 00:46:11,000
Yeah.

452
00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:12,000
DNA will tell.

453
00:46:12,000 --> 00:46:13,000
DNA will tell.

454
00:46:14,000 --> 00:46:19,000
Author Troy Cowan believes Booth escaped and fathered Harry Jerome Stevenson.

455
00:46:19,000 --> 00:46:24,000
Cowan's interest in the Booth story was sparked by his own family lore.

456
00:46:24,000 --> 00:46:28,000
I became interested in the John Wilkes Booth story because of my Aunt Jane Davis.

457
00:46:28,000 --> 00:46:33,000
Her grandfather was John Riley Davis and he was a cousin of Jefferson Davis.

458
00:46:33,000 --> 00:46:41,000
After Jefferson Davis got out of prison, John Wilkes Booth wrote him a letter saying that he was alive, well, and living in Mexico.

459
00:46:42,000 --> 00:46:45,000
But Cowan doesn't believe Booth died in India.

460
00:46:45,000 --> 00:46:54,000
In his version, Booth returned from India very much alive and went to Mexico, where many Confederate veterans fled after the Civil War.

461
00:46:54,000 --> 00:47:02,000
Booth left Mexico and went to Glen Rose, southwest of Dallas, and he opened a business selling liquor and tobacco.

462
00:47:02,000 --> 00:47:08,000
About this time, a U.S. marshal from Parris, Texas was coming to Glen Rose for his marriage.

463
00:47:08,000 --> 00:47:10,000
Booth did not want to be seen.

464
00:47:10,000 --> 00:47:15,000
He went east and he wound up in Swanee, Tennessee, and he got a job as a carpenter.

465
00:47:15,000 --> 00:47:18,000
There he met Louisa J. Payne.

466
00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:30,000
The fugitive Booth's alleged travels out west were of particular interest to the late Arthur Ben Chitty, who did extensive research into local Booth lore in Franklin County, Tennessee.

467
00:47:30,000 --> 00:47:34,000
The team met with his daughter to explore his theories.

468
00:47:34,000 --> 00:47:36,000
He started collecting oral histories.

469
00:47:36,000 --> 00:47:41,000
He never called himself a historian because he didn't do all the comparative analysis.

470
00:47:41,000 --> 00:47:47,000
He called himself a historiographer, and the distinction was that he collected this stuff and then let's see what happens with it later.

471
00:47:47,000 --> 00:47:52,000
So a gentleman came from Fayette Hill to give one of these oral histories to your dad.

472
00:47:52,000 --> 00:47:54,000
His name was Reese.

473
00:47:54,000 --> 00:47:56,000
He had known Maccager Payne.

474
00:47:56,000 --> 00:48:04,000
Now, Maccager Payne was the purported stepson of John Wilkes Booth, who was nine years old at the time Booth entered their lives.

475
00:48:04,000 --> 00:48:07,000
Here's something from Maccager Payne.

476
00:48:07,000 --> 00:48:08,000
Oh, yes.

477
00:48:08,000 --> 00:48:15,000
This John Wilkes Booth made the acquaintance with my mother at Swanee, Tennessee.

478
00:48:15,000 --> 00:48:19,000
And the 25th of February, 1872, he married my mother.

479
00:48:19,000 --> 00:48:28,000
He told mother and me that he was the man that killed Lincoln, that he was a rich man if he could get to Little Rock, and we got as far as Memphis, Tennessee.

480
00:48:28,000 --> 00:48:31,000
There he disappeared and we never heard of him anymore.

481
00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:38,000
While in Memphis, he was recognized. He got frightened and went back to Glen Rose, Texas.

482
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:42,000
Louisa was four or five months pregnant when he left.

483
00:48:42,000 --> 00:48:48,000
Louisa gave birth to a daughter. She named Laura Ida Elizabeth Booth.

484
00:48:48,000 --> 00:48:53,000
He was married here, and then your dad went looking for proof of that, and he actually found it.

485
00:48:53,000 --> 00:48:58,000
So this is a certified copy of the actual marriage certificate.

486
00:48:58,000 --> 00:49:03,000
It says a John W. Booth married to a Louisa Payne, February of 1872.

487
00:49:03,000 --> 00:49:05,000
There's also a marriage license.

488
00:49:05,000 --> 00:49:11,000
That's C.C. Rose, who's the Justice of the Peas, and you have J.N.O. W. Booth.

489
00:49:11,000 --> 00:49:14,000
And the other thing I see is an E at the end of it.

490
00:49:14,000 --> 00:49:21,000
Is it possible that E was an effort on Booth's part to disguise his true identity?

491
00:49:21,000 --> 00:49:26,000
Okay, but look at this. Rose. A C.C. Rose was on the marriage certificate.

492
00:49:26,000 --> 00:49:28,000
I believe it was a judge.

493
00:49:28,000 --> 00:49:30,000
We, John Wilkes Booth, and I see...

494
00:49:30,000 --> 00:49:37,000
C.C. Rose are held and firmly bound to the state of Tennessee in the sum of $1,250.

495
00:49:37,000 --> 00:49:42,000
John Wilkes Booth owed C.C. Rose $1,250, according to this document.

496
00:49:42,000 --> 00:49:46,000
Which is a lot of money. It's like $25,000. It's huge.

497
00:49:46,000 --> 00:49:52,000
Whereas the above bound Booth has this day obtained a license to marry Louisa Payne,

498
00:49:52,000 --> 00:49:54,000
this obligation to be void.

499
00:49:54,000 --> 00:49:55,000
He had to...

500
00:49:55,000 --> 00:49:56,000
She was pregnant.

501
00:49:56,000 --> 00:50:02,000
He had to void his debt with C.C. Rose, and the way he did it was marrying Louisa Payne.

502
00:50:02,000 --> 00:50:04,000
Was this a shotgun wedding?

503
00:50:04,000 --> 00:50:06,000
Maybe C.C. Rose was like an uncle.

504
00:50:06,000 --> 00:50:09,000
He was rescuing her reputation.

505
00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:19,000
To test this theory, Art Roderick brought the Payne marriage papers to forensic document examiner Robert Flohberg for analysis.

506
00:50:19,000 --> 00:50:25,000
Well, Rob, I know you spent quite a few years in law enforcement. How long have you been doing document examinations?

507
00:50:25,000 --> 00:50:27,000
Been doing it now for 30 years.

508
00:50:27,000 --> 00:50:34,000
This is a series of documents from the state of Tennessee, Franklin County, from 1872,

509
00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:41,000
which purport to be marriage licenses and accompanying documents between Louisa Payne and John Wilkes Booth.

510
00:50:41,000 --> 00:50:45,000
They do appear to be from that timeframe, 1872.

511
00:50:45,000 --> 00:50:50,000
The middle name is not really evident, so it's John W. Booth. We don't know that it's Wilkes.

512
00:50:50,000 --> 00:50:55,000
Booth is spelled B-O-O-T-H-E. Why would they add an E to Booth?

513
00:50:55,000 --> 00:51:00,000
The story is that after they got married, he confessed to her that, hey, I'm John Wilkes Booth.

514
00:51:00,000 --> 00:51:05,000
And being the religious woman that she was, she wanted to be married under his real name.

515
00:51:05,000 --> 00:51:07,000
And the question is, did he alter his handwriting?

516
00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:08,000
Right.

517
00:51:08,000 --> 00:51:13,000
You can disguise your handwriting, but it's difficult. There are so many aspects you have to disguise.

518
00:51:13,000 --> 00:51:17,000
And I doubt that he could have done that under the pressure of signing a court document.

519
00:51:17,000 --> 00:51:20,000
What do you think about this particular document?

520
00:51:20,000 --> 00:51:25,000
It's an agreement between a justice of the peace and a John W. Booth.

521
00:51:25,000 --> 00:51:31,000
We can compare the actual groomed signature with the known John Wilkes Booth signature.

522
00:51:31,000 --> 00:51:37,000
There are inconsistencies to where I doubt that this would be John Wilkes Booth.

523
00:51:37,000 --> 00:51:42,000
There's an inconsistency with the T-crossing and how the lower case letters are created.

524
00:51:42,000 --> 00:51:43,000
So it's two different people.

525
00:51:43,000 --> 00:51:44,000
Not John Wilkes Booth.

526
00:51:44,000 --> 00:51:46,000
Not John Wilkes Booth.

527
00:51:47,000 --> 00:51:51,000
Floberg also examined that John Byron Wilkes will.

528
00:51:51,000 --> 00:51:55,000
That's unfortunate. There's no handwriting on the wheels. It's just a typewritten document.

529
00:51:55,000 --> 00:51:59,000
Filed in Clay Circuit Court in a state of Indiana.

530
00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:01,000
Did the typewriter exist in 1883?

531
00:52:01,000 --> 00:52:06,000
Well, yes it did. At that time, typewriters had been around at least ten years.

532
00:52:06,000 --> 00:52:12,000
And this specific typeface was in existence in the 1880s.

533
00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:14,000
The early typewriters were all capital letters.

534
00:52:14,000 --> 00:52:17,000
So it is conceivable that this is a legitimate document.

535
00:52:17,000 --> 00:52:21,000
Unfortunately, there is no cursive signature from the testator.

536
00:52:21,000 --> 00:52:24,000
And that would have been John Byron Wilkes.

537
00:52:24,000 --> 00:52:27,000
John Wilkes Booth had a very unique cursive signature.

538
00:52:27,000 --> 00:52:33,000
And if he would have signed this alias name with a lot of the similar letters and the letter connections,

539
00:52:33,000 --> 00:52:35,000
we could conceivably make a match.

540
00:52:35,000 --> 00:52:36,000
Right.

541
00:52:39,000 --> 00:52:42,000
To further investigate the mystery of John Wilkes Booth,

542
00:52:42,000 --> 00:52:47,000
the team went to Massachusetts and the grave of the assassin's oldest brother,

543
00:52:47,000 --> 00:52:49,000
Junius Brutus Booth Jr.

544
00:52:49,000 --> 00:52:52,000
Their guide is his great grandson, Tony Booth.

545
00:52:52,000 --> 00:52:56,000
So right over here is your great grandfather.

546
00:52:56,000 --> 00:53:00,000
How were you told that you were part of the Booth family?

547
00:53:00,000 --> 00:53:05,000
Actually, it was probably when I was 13 or 14, there was a trunk that was hidden away in the attic.

548
00:53:05,000 --> 00:53:09,000
And one day I got in there and opened it up and I found all these costumes.

549
00:53:09,000 --> 00:53:13,000
Then I asked my mom and she said, well, you're a Booth.

550
00:53:13,000 --> 00:53:16,000
And I said, what does that mean particularly, you know?

551
00:53:16,000 --> 00:53:19,000
And she said, well, you're related to John Wilkes Booth.

552
00:53:19,000 --> 00:53:23,000
And it was sort of a stigma, but it wasn't anything that I couldn't handle.

553
00:53:23,000 --> 00:53:25,000
I'm not a fan of John Wilkes Booth.

554
00:53:25,000 --> 00:53:28,000
He's the same to me as everybody else.

555
00:53:28,000 --> 00:53:30,000
He's a villain and a killer.

556
00:53:30,000 --> 00:53:33,000
And I had no desire to be related to the guy.

557
00:53:33,000 --> 00:53:39,000
Did your mom ever tell you about your great grandfather or any of your uncles?

558
00:53:39,000 --> 00:53:42,000
She mentioned that they were actors.

559
00:53:42,000 --> 00:53:49,000
And that the stuff that I'd found was costume that they wore, like for Julius Caesar

560
00:53:49,000 --> 00:53:53,000
and for some of these other plays that they did on stage.

561
00:53:53,000 --> 00:53:58,000
To help solve the mystery, Tony Booth agreed to provide his DNA.

562
00:53:58,000 --> 00:54:03,000
It will be compared to those who believe they may be descended from children fathered by Booth

563
00:54:03,000 --> 00:54:05,000
after history says he died.

564
00:54:05,000 --> 00:54:11,000
You can prove that somebody was born after the date of John Wilkes' death, supposed death.

565
00:54:11,000 --> 00:54:15,000
That would be proof that John Wilkes never did die in the barn, that he lived after that.

566
00:54:15,000 --> 00:54:20,000
I'm in a way, hope that he did die because he deserved to die right there in the barn.

567
00:54:20,000 --> 00:54:23,000
But if he didn't, then let's find out why.

568
00:54:23,000 --> 00:54:24,000
Or where.

569
00:54:24,000 --> 00:54:26,000
And how he escaped.

570
00:54:27,000 --> 00:54:33,000
Theories about Booth's possible escape often include a mysterious figure named James William Boyd.

571
00:54:33,000 --> 00:54:42,000
The majority of historians agree that John Wilkes Booth was killed at the Garrett Farm by Union troops on April 26th, 1865.

572
00:54:42,000 --> 00:54:50,000
His accomplice, David Herald, was arrested and later hanged with fellow co-conspirator Louis Powell, George Atzerot and Mary Serrat.

573
00:54:50,000 --> 00:55:00,000
After his arrest, David Herald had given testimony that Booth was using the alias Boyd when they crossed into Virginia and met the Confederate cavalrymen.

574
00:55:00,000 --> 00:55:08,000
And one of those rebel troopers, Willie Jett, testified that Booth gave his name as James William Boyd when they took him to Garrett's Farm.

575
00:55:08,000 --> 00:55:14,000
Yet some researchers and Booth family members believe Booth wasn't at Garrett's Farm that night.

576
00:55:14,000 --> 00:55:19,000
Some suggest he escaped the manhunt in the company of a young man named Edwin Hinson.

577
00:55:19,000 --> 00:55:25,000
But if Booth wasn't traveling with David Herald, then who was the man with Herald in that burning barn?

578
00:55:25,000 --> 00:55:28,000
And who was James William Boyd?

579
00:55:30,000 --> 00:55:41,000
It's well documented that a Confederate soldier named James W. Boyd existed and that while a prisoner of war, he petitioned Secretary of War Edwin Stanton for his release.

580
00:55:41,000 --> 00:55:46,000
What happened to Boyd after his release is where the mystery lies.

581
00:55:46,000 --> 00:56:00,000
In a statement purportedly made by the Confederate officer John Singleton Mosby shortly before his death in 1916, Mosby claims he sent James William Boyd to help Booth kidnap Lincoln.

582
00:56:00,000 --> 00:56:04,000
If Mosby's statement is authentic, it's a stunning claim.

583
00:56:04,000 --> 00:56:14,000
Author Troy Cowan asserts that when the kidnap plot failed and Booth impossibly killed the president instead, Boyd fled south along the same path as Booth.

584
00:56:14,000 --> 00:56:22,000
John Wilkes Booth and David Herald met up with him by accident at Cox's Farm, the Knicks House after a year.