 Library of Congress 
 
 Descendants of John Wilkes Booth have agreed to exhume his brother's body for DNA testing in an attempt to determine whether the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln escaped capture and eluded justice, as the family has been told. Most believe he was tracked down 10 days later and shot inside a tobacco barn in rural Virginia by Union soldiers and buried in an unmarked grave in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery.That, however, is not the story that has been passed down in the Booth family. "I'm absolutely in favor of exhuming Edwin," said Joanne Hulme, 60, a resident of the Kensington section of the city who is the historian in the Booth family. "Let's have the truth and put this thing to rest." A matinee idol 
 
 At 9 p.m. April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, son of theatrical parents, walked into Taltavull's Star Saloon next to Ford's Theatre and asked for a bottle of whiskey and some water. In the book, Bates suggested a Booth look-alike was mistakenly killed at the farm. "If the man who killed our greatest president got away, and a giant hoax was perpetrated on the American people, then we should know about it," he told the Inquirer. Booth then assumed the name John St. Helen and committed suicide in 1903 in Enid, Okla.In an effort to end the speculation, Hulme and her family want to compare DNA from Booth's brother, Edwin, to that of a bone specimen at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington. He's spent decades investigating the case.
– DNA evidence could settle once and for all the truth about what transpired in the days after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The official story is that John Wilkes Booth was killed in a barn days after shooting the president—but his descendants say the dead man was just a lookalike. Now, they’re willing to have Booth’s brother exhumed in order to compare his DNA to that of the man in the barn, AOL News reports. The latter man’s DNA could be obtained from a bone specimen housed at a museum in Washington, DC—but the family wants to secure the museum’s permission before it exhumes the body. The real John Wilkes Booth changed his name and committed suicide 38 years later in 1903, the family says. “I'm absolutely in favor of exhuming Edwin," a Booth family historian tells the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Let's have the truth and put this thing to rest."