The Attempt to Steal Lincoln’s Corpse
By Harald Frost
The History Channel Magazine, 2008
A plot to steal the mortal remains of Abraham Lincoln was hatched in 1876 by a Chicago businessman named Big Jim Kennally as a way to preserve his profit margin.
Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois.
“Gentlemen, this is gonna be the easiest robbery in the history of the world. Abe’s been dead for 11 years and nobody’s guarding his tomb in Springfield – no Pinkertons, no cops, nobody. The graveyard is deserted, gentlemen. No one’s guarding a national treasure.
“So here’s what you do. You wait until dark. You climb over the fence. You bust open the lock on the tomb’s door and you go inside. There’s a big marble container in there. Bust it open and you’ll find Lincoln’s coffin. Haul it out. Load it on a wagon. Get out of town. Meanwhile I’ll send a ransom note to the government. I’m thinking two hundred thousand bucks plus the release of Mr. Boyd. If they say no, the eternal rest of Honest Abe is gonna transpire in some sand dunes on Lake Michigan.”
*
Big Jim’s plot may have been inspired in part by the frequency of grave robbing in the 19th century.
Medical schools, seeking cadavers for dissection, paid well for fresh merchandise, no questions asked. Graves were robbed, deliveries were made, cash changed hands, science marched on. These thefts, if discovered, were not greeted happily by the public – mobs of citizens, outraged by body snatchings, attacked medical schools and doctor’s offices a number of times, including in New York City in 1788, Baltimore in 1807, New Haven in 1824, and Cleveland in 1852.
Most of the time, grave robbers didn’t get caught. They would open a plot in the middle of the night, slip the body into a canvas bag, and re-plant the lilies in nice straight lines. In coming weeks, visitors to the site would have no idea their beloved Uncle Beaufort was stretched out on a stone slab downtown being examined by medical students.
Grave robbing declined in the second half of the 1800s as legislatures passed laws allowing medical schools to take possession of unclaimed bodies. Still, shortages sometimes occurred, and a moderate trade continued in North America and Europe. As late as 1911, the writer Ambrose Bierce, in his “Devil’s Dictionary,” defined “grave” as a “place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student.”
Whatever the source of his inspiration, Big Jim decided to steal Old Abe. The president had been embalmed in April of 1865, so he hadn’t become a skeleton, or dust. Big Jim felt fairly sure that some vestige resided in the tomb.
Hughes was a con man with a long rap sheet for passing counterfeit money. Mullen was a dark-haired little guy with a large walrus mustache. Swegles was a wise-cracking chap who’d been busted a few times for horse thievery. As it happens, in the autumn of 1876 he was not only a member of the Kennally Gang, he was on the payroll of the United States government. He was an informant – a snitch, stoolie, canary, roper, fink – paid five dollars a day by the U.S. Secret Service to keep tabs on the counterfeiters and other ne’er-do-wells who drank and played pool at a Chicago saloon called the Hub.
In the summer of 1876, Swegles began weaseling his way into the confidence of Hub denizens. Needing to convince his new pals of his criminal credentials, he declared that he was the “boss body-snatcher of Chicago.” Hughes and Mullen were suitably impressed. They were convinced, writes journalist and historian Lloyd Lewis, that this fellow was “shrewd and practiced.” Hughes and Mullen recruited Swegles to help with the Lincoln job.
Swegles coughed up plot details to his handlers in the Secret Service office in downtown Chicago. The Feds sent him back to the Hub for more information, and he soon learned the exact date of the robbery: November 7, Election Night, picked by Hughes and Mullen because they figured that Springfield, ordinarily sleepy, would be full of people and booze, and no one would pay heed to a group of strangers passing through.
On the designated night, Hughes, Mullen, and Swegles hiked along a dark Springfield road toward Oak Ridge Cemetery. Several Secret Service agents, informed of the exact time for the heist, hid near the president’s tomb, along with a couple of private detectives. They intended to swoop down on the bad guys at exactly the right moment and catch ’em red-handed. However, the evening got wacky.
Detail of statuary at Lincoln’s Tomb.
The president’s lead-lined wooden casket was encased in a marble sarcophagus, which was located above ground, in the burial chamber. The thieves knew the layout. They had scouted the site thoroughly – visitors were allowed into the chamber to pay respects.
Mullen produced a hacksaw and began ripping away at the lock mechanism of the door, but pretty quickly, the saw’s blade broke. This was unexpected. Mullen had not thought to bring a second blade. However, a nice sturdy file had been packed. Mullen set to work again, alternating with Hughes for the next half-hour. Swegles apparently supervised, or kept watch.
Eureka! The lock fell apart. They entered the tomb.
The coffin gave them trouble. The damn thing was so laden with lead that they couldn’t lift it out of the vault. They got a little bit of it out – 15 inches by later measurement – before taking a break. Mullen told Swegles to run and fetch the fourth man, Nealy, for extra muscle.
The commanding officer, Patrick D. Tyrrell, strode to the vital door, yanked it open, struck a match, and peered inside. Empty. Not a living soul in there.
The Feds quickly regained their momentum, arresting Hughes and Mullen in Chicago. Accused of conspiracy and larceny, the two men went on trial in May, 1877, with Swegles testifying for the prosecution, and with court reporters recording the full story for posterity. Hughes and Mullen were convicted and sent to Joliet for a couple of years. The boss man, Big Jim Kennally, was not formally linked to the attempted body theft, but spent significant time in prison over the next few years on various charges including counterfeiting. The Kennally Gang then pretty much vanished from the pages of history.
In 1901 the Lincoln Tomb was refurbished. The authorities decided to again move the coffins of Abe and Mary. The two boxes were to be placed in a steel box (below ground) and fresh concrete would be slathered on. Workers hacked the boxes out of the old concrete.
Among the people examining Lincoln in 1901 was a Springfield resident named Fleetwood Lindley, who died in 1963. He was the last living person to view the actual face of the 16th President of the United States.
By Harald Frost
The remains of Abraham Lincoln were almost stolen, but the body of William the Conqueror suffered an even stranger fate. It sort of exploded.
William’s corpse was swollen on the day of the funeral. The casket remained open. Everyone needed to see that the king was really dead. After the viewing, officials struggled to shove William all the way into his box, shut the lid, and be done with the business. But the lid wouldn’t close, the king was too big, and suddenly some of the skin ripped apart – i.e., a sort of explosion. The author J.R. Planche, writing in 1874, mentions a “precipitate retreat of the mourners.”
However, Peron was soon overthrown by a military coup. The new leadership decided that Evita needed to be removed from politics, so, in 1955, they stole her, storing the corpse in a radio equipment box in an attic. They later secretly shipped the mummy to Italy, burying it under a false name.
Alexander the Great
The warrior’s dead body was regarded as a talisman and was preserved for centuries in a glass coffin filled with honey in Alexandria, Egypt. The mummy disappeared into the mists of time, perhaps when Sassanid Persians seized Alexandria in 619 CE or when Arabs conquered the city in 641. In the 1930s, archaeologist Howard Carter (discoverer of King Tutankhamun’s tomb) claimed to know Alexander’s whereabouts but didn’t divulge any useful information before his death in 1939. Psychics have investigated the matter. They say the remains may be residing deep under the streets of Alexandria.
This legend, believed or half-believed by many people, is not true, according to several authoritative investigators, including Barbara and David Mikkelson, who probe urban legends and historical rumors at Snopes.com. The evidence shows that Disney was cremated after his death on December 15, 1966, at the age of 65, and that his ashes were interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Among the pieces of evidence is the death certificate, a legally-binding document with considerable financial implications.
Disney was supposedly frozen by experts in cryonics, the “science” of entombing dead humans in a low-temperature state with the hope of reviving them. The field began getting public attention in 1964 with publication of “The Prospect of Immortality” by Robert C.W. Ettinger. The book is an amazing expression of American technological hubris, which, in 1964, was at flood tide. The book includes Ettinger’s admission, “I had and have, no credentials worth mentioning….”
(In terms of popular culture, an apotheosis of American technological hubris came with “The Man From UNCLE,” a huge TV hit, which debuted on September 22, 1964. It was a weekly ode to the ability of flashy high tech gear, plus a dollop of old-fashioned guts, to solve big problems.)
The story about Frozen Walt probably got started in part because he was Mr. Gee-Whiz about new technologies. Also, on January 12, 1967, a few weeks after Disney’s death, the body of a man named James Bedford was placed in permanent storage in a freezer in Glendale, California, not far from Disneyland – the first person to be “successfully” frozen by cryonics technology. ●