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In response to Bates' claim, in 1913 the Maryland Historical Society published an account authored by Baltimore mayor William M. Pegram, who claimed that he had viewed Booth's remains upon the casket's arrival at the Weaver funeral home in Baltimore on February 18, 1869, for burial at Green Mount Cemetery. Pegram, who had known Booth very will, since a young man, submitted a sworn statement that the body which he had seen in 1869 was actually Booth's. Others also positively identified this body as Booth at the funeral home, including Booth's mother, brother, and sister, along with his dentist and other Baltimore acquaintances.
The rumor spread by Bates was revived in the 1920s when a corpse was exhibited on a national tour by a carnival promoter and advertised as the "Man Who Shot Lincoln". According to a 1938 article in the Saturday Evening Post, the exhibitor said that he obtained St. Helen's corpse from Bates' widow.
In 1977, a book entitled The Lincoln Conspiracy by David W. Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier, Jr. contended that there was a government plot to conceal Booth's escape. The book sold more than one million copies and was made into a feature film called The Lincoln Conspiracy, which was theatrically released later that year.
In 1998 another book, The Curse of Cain: The Untold Story of John Wilkes Booth contended that Booth had escaped, sought refuge in Japan, and eventually returned to the United States. In 1994 two historians, as well as several of Booth's descendants, sought a court order for the exhumation of Booth's body at Green Mount Cemetery. The applicants hoped to prove or disprove the many theories concerning Booth's supposed escape. But the application was denied by Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Joseph H. H. Kaplan. The Maryland Court of Special Appeals upheld the ruling.
In December 2010, descendants of Edwin Booth reported that they obtained permission to exhume Booth's body to obtain DNA samples to compare with a sample of his brother John's DNA. The family hoped to obtain samples of John Wilkes's DNA from remains such as vertebrae stored at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Maryland. This application was also denied.
Recently, in an April 15, 2019 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer written by Edward Colimore, the author alleged that facial-recognition software had performed an analysis of the faces of John Wilkes Booth with that of the man known as David George. According to the article, in less than a minute, results came back that showed a strong possibility that the photographs were of the same man. The article acknowledged that these results are not as definitive as DNA results, but facial recognition is used by law enforcement agencies and has some credibility. The test results support the contention that Booth lived 38 years more after Lincoln's assassination as St. Helen and George.
After researchers obtained the best images available, they were fed into a high-resolution scanner. According to those performing the test, George’s photo was nearly a perfect match with Booth’s, within the top 1 percent of those bearing similar facial features, according to researchers who worked with the creator of the New York Police Department’s first dedicated facial-recognition unit. St. Helen’s photograph was damaged and had to be repaired for the test. The experiment was used for a feature episode of a television show on the Discovery Channel.
History records Booth as having shot Lincoln in the back of the head at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, before fleeing through Maryland and Virginia. It was there that he was reported to have been cornered by soldiers and detectives shortly after 2 a.m. on that Wednesday in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia. Booth is reported to have said, “Draw up your men before the door, and I’ll come out and fight the whole command. Well, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me!” A soldier lit some hay, threw it inside the barn where Booth was believed to be hiding. When a soldier named Boston Corbett spied a silhouette of a man on crutches with a carbine resting on his hip, Corbett is supposed to have shot Booth, mortally wounding him in the neck. People who saw the body at the barn questioned the official account. Some claimed that the dead man didn’t resemble Booth, and even though others had identified the corpse as Booth’s, doubt remained.
The new technology is not foolproof, and as Rob D’Ovidio, associate professor of criminology and justice studies at Drexel University, states, "the evidence needs to be strong if you’re going to rewrite history.” Facial characteristics are not as compelling evidence as DNA or even a fingerprint. Much depends on the quality of the photos and if the photos are of questionable quality, the results will also be questionable.