Lincoln's Grave Robbers

While officially charging Hughes and Mullen with the November 7 break-in at the Monument, Tyrrell confiscates Hughes’s shoes, which, he says, can be identified by the cobbler who repaired them, placing Hughes in Springfield on that day. Protesting their innocence, Hughes and Mullen request a lawyer. They specifically want William O’Brien, a heavyweight attorney from Chicago. O’Brien meets with his clients and then showboats his own “theory” for the press: He says that Tyrrell and Washburn concocted an elaborate frameup to glorify themselves as heroes, railroading his innocent clients for a phony break-in. In an interview for the Chicago Times, Hughes claims that Lewis Swegles, a notorious “horse thief,” tried to lure him into various criminal schemes, all which Hughes refused. Next, he says, both Swegles and Tyrrell began shadowing him, waiting for a chance to frame him for some crime. Just before the election, he claims, he traveled to Springfield to visit Mullen, who was sick; Swegles followed them there, and whispered to them his plan to steal Lincoln’s body. Hughes says he was shocked by the vile suggestion. He claims that at 6 pm, hours before the break-in, he and Mullen left Springfield by train—only to find themselves falsely arrested 10 days later. Hughes seems calm and collected throughout the interview, while Mullen shifts nervously in his seat.

On Monday, the two prisoners are charged with two crimes—“conspiracy” to steal Lincoln’s body, and “attempted larceny” for trying to steal his casket. Combined, the charges could send them to prison for five years. Tyrrell begins to assemble his witnesses, including Power, who saw the suspects at the Monument on the day of the crime, and the Springfield station ticket agents, who deny selling them tickets for the 6 pm train. A boost to his case arrives in the form of Thomas Keagle, one of the two farmers who saw the dust-covered suspects stagger into Sherman, Illinois, on November 8, with their preposterous story about being in a posse. At the suspects’ jail cell, Keagle immediately identifies them. Also testifying is the train conductor who listened to the suspects’ outlandish story about buying cows. However, none of this evidence, compelling as it may be, definitively places the suspects at the Monument at the time of the break-in. Since Tyrrell bungled the ambush, the only eyewitness to their crime is Swegles, a longtime thief.

The case against them seems fundamentally weak; but then, the two suspects take a foolish risk to fabricate an alibi for themselves. From jail, Mullen writes a letter to a crony, setting down a fake story for him to parrot in court about the two defendants’ whereabouts that day. When he gets no response, he writes again to another friend, soliciting a different fake alibi for a bribe of $35. Both letters are turned over to the police, and constitute the most damning evidence against the suspects. The good news for Tyrrell continues: Plied with an offer of $10, a member of the Logan County Gang tells him that James Kennally is the one who hired them to steal Lincoln’s body back in July. Though this cannot be used in court, Tyrrell has the satisfaction of knowing that his hunch was correct: Kennally, desperate to free Ben Boyd, orchestrated the whole “dastardly” plot to save his counterfeiting empire.

The Hayes-Tilden presidential contest enters a petulant new phase as Republican states throw out thousands of legitimate Democratic votes in reprisal for widespread voter intimidation by Democrats in Southern states, including mass violence against African Americans. As 1877 begins, it seems harder than ever to determine which of the candidates received the most votes. Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana are still hotly contested, raising the specter of nationwide violence, possibly even another civil war. Finally, a “panicked” Congress drops the decision into the hands of a special commission drawn up from 10 congressmen and five Supreme Court justices. They ultimately vote in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes along party lines, 8-7.

The trial of Jack Hughes and Terrence Mullen begins on May 29, 1877, to a packed courthouse. The prosecution’s many witnesses lay out a wealth of evidence, from the Springfield hotel clerk who testifies how the two defendants registered that day under false names, to the farmers who saw them in flight, to the Pinkerton detective who spotted Hughes at the Monument just hours before the break-in. Lewis Swegles testifies the longest, laying out the whole bodysnatching plot, from its inception to its chaotic miscarriage. Though the defense virulently attacks the ex-thief’s credibility, he does not break a sweat.

The defendants’ own words prove most devastating to their case, in the form of Mullen’s jailhouse letters to his cronies, begging for fake alibis. On the stand, Hughes and Mullen try to blame everything on Swegles—Hughes brashly, Mullen meekly—but the jury does not buy it. Nevertheless, the defendants’ very fecklessness helps them, in a sense: The jury does not see them as intelligent men and sentences the thieves to only one year in prison each. Tyrrell derides the lenient sentence as a “compromise verdict.” Robert Lincoln, however, shows his gratitude to Tyrrell by presenting him with a large portrait of his father.

Abraham Lincoln’s body, meanwhile, is still lying under a heap of lumber deep in the labyrinth of the Lincoln Monument. In the summer of 1877, this becomes local knowledge due to John Carroll Power telling some workmen about it. Alarmed, Power turns again to the Monument Association, but without success: Its elderly members cannot face the ordeal of more drudgery in that suffocating labyrinth.

Almost a year later, on May 22, 1878, Jack Hughes and Terrence Mullen complete their one-year sentence and walk out of Illinois’s Joliet Prison. Patrick Tyrrell, however, immediately handcuffs Hughes and hauls him back to Chicago to face counterfeiting charges from several years earlier. This time, Hughes gets a sentence of three years of hard labor. Mullen, for his part, tries to resume bartending at the Hub only to find that his business partner James Kennally has sold the bar and absconded with the money.

Meanwhile, the pressure builds on John Carroll Power to find Abraham Lincoln a secure resting place. Disturbing news from New York City, about a rich man’s body that was stolen and held for ransom, worries Power; finally, on November 18, 1878, he engages a group of young men to bury Lincoln’s coffin in the labyrinth. All seems well until a few days later, when Power receives an anonymous letter with a vague but menacing “warning,” which he fears might have something to do with another threat to Lincoln’s body. In response, he and the men who have just buried Lincoln’s body form a secret organization devoted to the protection of the late president’s remains: They call themselves the Lincoln Guard of Honor.

In March 1880, Patrick Tyrrell’s perseverance continues to pay off. Terrence Mullen, who has been picked up on a counterfeiting charge in St. Louis, agrees to give evidence against James “Big Jim” Kennally. As a result, the Secret Service catches Kennally with a stash of fake $10 bills, sending him to prison for two years. As for Lewis Swegles, he reverted back to crime: That same year (1880), he is back in prison for burglary, this time for 12 years. Also, Pete McCartney, the counterfeiter and jailbreaker who is Ben Boyd’s brother-in-law, is nabbed in Indiana for “shoving” and sent down for 15 years of hard labor.

Two years later, in 1882, Mary Todd Lincoln dies and is laid to rest in the Lincoln Monument catacomb, beside Abraham Lincoln’s empty sarcophagus. Eventually, her son Robert asks Power and other members of the Lincoln Guard of Honor to place her coffin beside Abraham Lincoln’s, in the hole in the labyrinth, to fulfill her desire to be buried with her husband: This reburial is conducted in complete secrecy. As far as the general public knows, Abraham Lincoln still rests in his marble sarcophagus—and Power never suggests otherwise on his tours of the Monument. However, rumors persist that the president’s sarcophagus is empty, and finally, Power convinces the Association to give Lincoln yet another burial, to settle the matter once and for all. On April 14, 1887—in the morning, rather than in the secrecy of night—members of the Guard of Honor, assisted by a local plumber, hoist the coffins of Abraham and Mary Lincoln out of their labyrinth hole and lower them into a new hole in the catacomb. Workers pour in four feet of concrete and add a layer of floor tiles, and Power at last breathes a sigh of relief.

After 10 years in prison, Ben Boyd is released and finds honest work as an engraver at a factory, impressing his former nemeses at the Secret Service with his newfound integrity and fortitude. John Carroll Power, still caretaker at the Lincoln Monument, writes the first book about the bodysnatching case and dies in 1894 at the age of 74. In 1899, Patrick Tyrrell retires from the Secret Service; he goes on to live for another 22 years, to the age of 89. In 1900, the Lincoln Monument, plagued by structural flaws from its shoddy construction, undergoes an extensive renovation. After the work, Lincoln’s body is finally restored to his marble sarcophagus, and Mary takes her place in the family crypt beside him. However, Robert Lincoln is dismayed that his father’s body is once again aboveground and vulnerable, and he insists on yet another, final burial, this time in a 10-foot hole in the catacomb floor, enclosed by a steel cage. On September 26, 1901, members of the Lincoln Guard of Honor, after verifying that the president’s body is indeed in his coffin, lower it into the hole, lock the cage around it, and cover it with tons of wet cement. No one has disturbed it since.

The “bonus section” provides a contextual history of bodysnatching. It was a widespread crime that reached epidemic proportions in the 1800s. Body snatchers, known colloquially as “ghouls”—though they preferred to be called “resurrectionists”—were once an important, if illegal, adjunct to medical science. Many hospitals, medical colleges, and private doctors depended on a steady supply of fresh cadavers for anatomy training, and professional graverobbers were happy to supply them, for the right price.

William Cunningham, the notorious “Prince of the Ghouls” who robbed graves all over Cincinnati in the 19th century, had a particularly brazen modus operandi: After hoisting a fresh corpse from its grave, usually by digging a hole just big enough to pull the body through, he’d seat the body beside him on his wagon, passing it off as a drunken companion. Some unscrupulous doctors, unwilling to pay the ghouls’ price, enlisted their students to carry out the theft or did it themselves. Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, famed throughout the Midwest for his knowledge of anatomy, once went to great risks to steal the body of a girl who had died from a rare disease, breaking into the morgue at night and hiding the girl’s corpse from gun-wielding relatives who were standing guard. Another doctor, Marmaduke Burr Wright, vividly described his own harrowing theft of the unwieldy corpse of an obese man, which ended with him and his companions pushing it in a wheelbarrow through the streets of Cincinnati. Finally, in the late 1800s, Congress passed laws making it much easier for doctors to legally acquire bodies for dissection, bringing an end to these macabre escapades.