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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.