Dr. Ray Neff, a retired health sciences professor at Indiana State University

Indiana State University

Indiana State University is a public university located in Terre Haute, Indiana, United States.The Princeton Review has named Indiana State as one of the "Best in the Midwest" seven years running, and the College of Education's Graduate Program was recently named as a 'Top 100' by U.S...

 with a chemistry background, is a leading proponent of an alternative history theory about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...

 and his killer John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and, by the 1860s, was a well-known actor...

.

Neff is the co-author of Dark Union along with Leonard Guttridge. The book proposes an alternative view to the conventional version of Lincoln's assassination. While it mentions the theory that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton

Edwin M. Stanton

Edwin McMasters Stanton was an American lawyer and politician who served as Secretary of War under the Lincoln Administration during the American Civil War from 1862–1865...

 was involved in the assassination conspiracy, the book dismisses it and suggests that John Wilkes Booth took on the role of assassin largely for personal reasons. Dark Union also contends that Booth escaped, eventually settling in India, as it was James W. Boyd who was actually shot in the barn at Garrett's farm. Indiana State University houses a collection of materials, some of which has been digitized and been made available for online viewing. This theory is in marked contrast with the version of the assassination proposed by Edward Steers, Jr.

Edward Steers, Jr.

Edward Steers, Jr. is an American historian specializing in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Steers worked as a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland for thirty-two years until he retired in 1994 and started a new career as a writer...

Neff is also one of many historians who traces the roots of Lincoln's assassination to the Dahlgren Affair

Dahlgren Affair

The Dahlgren Affair was an incident in the American Civil War involving a failed Union raid on the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia on March 2, 1864...

- one of very few areas where he and Steers agree.