John Wilkes Booth

In February 1869 President Andrew Johnson released John Wilkes Booth’s remains to the Booth family. On February 15th the pine coffin was opened and the body identified. Booth’s head was found to be entirely detached from his body. The remains were sent to Baltimore, and there the detached head was passed around and looked upon by those present for the identification. Booth’s third, fourth, and fifth cervical vertebrae, which were removed during his autopsy, are housed along with several mementos from Abraham Lincoln’s autopsy (including the bullet that killed the president, the probe used to remove the bullet, fragments of the president’s skull, hair from the president, and the blood-stained cuffs of the lab coat worn by Dr. Edward Curtis at the autopsy) at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Md. Additional hair samples from Lincoln’s autopsy are in the Lincoln Room Museum in the Wills House in Gettysburg and the Weldon Petz Abraham Lincoln Collection, at the Plymouth Historical Society & Museum which is located in Plymouth, Michigan. Another fragment from Booth’s autopsy is in a bottle in the Mutter Medical Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. In October 1994 a petition was filed in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City to exhume Booth’s remains from Green Mount Cemetery. The petitioners were people who identified themselves as Booth’s relatives. The cemetery argued that its solemn duty was to protect the sanctity of those interred unless there was overwhelming evidence that the body buried there was not Booth’s. Judge Joseph H.H. Kaplan ruled that the evidence for exhumation was insufficient.