United States Centennial Body Snatchers: The Bizarre Plot to Steal Abe Lincoln's Corpse in 1876 and Hold it for Ransom among the Sand Dunes of Indiana

Indiana’s Dunes National Park sits on the shores of Lake Michigan.  It is really nothing more than a large, desolate, sandy beach composed of over fifteen thousand square acres of constantly shifting sand dunes.  In 1876 well over one hundred years before this landscape became part of the National Park Service--that didn’t happen until 2009 and until then this place was known simply as “Indiana’s Dune Country”--it was the perfect place to hide away from the long arm of the law or even the perfect place to hide a dead body for that matter.

In October of 1876 master counterfeiter Benjamin Boyd was jailed in the city of Joliet, Illinois at the state’s penitentiary after having come to the attention of Chicago law enforcement for--what else?--passing off fake bills.  Passing off fake bills, or counterfeiting was big business in the days after the American Civil War, in fact, it’s not a stretch to say that as the United States celebrated its centennial anniversary in 1876 that the nation was in the midst of a veritable epidemic of counterfeiting.  Technology at the time made it difficult to tell fake United States currency from real currency and anyone with a modest budget, guts and a criminal inclination could literally churn out hundreds of fake dollars  by simply bleaching single dollar bills and turning them into larger denominations.

Back in 1876, long before the advent of computers, all of the work of counterfeiting greenbacks was done by hand.  Each bill had to be painstakingly engraved by hand and the look had to be flawless.  Master engravers of the time were really highly skilled artisans whose services were in high demand in the American underworld and none of these counterfeit artisans was better than Chicago’s Benjamin Boyd.  But as October turned to November in 1876 master engraver Benjamin Boyd was locked up in Joliet, Illinois and this was a big problem for James “Big Jim” Kineally.

James "Big Jim" Kineally

Simply put, James “Big Jim” Kineally was Benjamin’s Boyd’s boss.  In the 1870’s James “Big Jim” Kineally was a lot of people’s boss in the Chicago underworld because Big Jim was the leader of the Irish mob in the Windy City at the time.  However, with his master engraver behind bars Big Jim Kineally’s most lucrative criminal racket, counterfeiting, had ground to a screeching halt and this was a BIG problem for Big Jim.

Just when it looked like the authorities may have finally one-upped the Irish Mob in Chicago Big Jim Kineally came up with one of the most audacious and grotesque kidnapping and ransom plans in the history of true crime.

The Illinois State Penitentiary where master counterfeiter Benjamin Boyd was being held in Joliet, Illinois, was only about fifty miles, as the crow flies, from the location of Indiana’s desolate shifting “Dunes Country” an area that “Big Jim” Kineally knew well because he had hid out there many times in the past while on the run from his organized crime enemies.

Kineally realized, as did every other American, that 1876 though just over a decade after the end of the American Civil War was a time of patriotic fervor, and he also realized that in order to get his master counterfeiter out of jail, and to pull off the crime of the 19th century,  he needed to do something so bold, so audacious, that it would grab the entire nation’s attention and force federal authorities to come to the bargaining table.

Dunes National Park in Indiana

If one made a triangle on a map of Illinois and Indiana with one corner in Joliet, another corner in the Dunes National Park in Indiana--than the point of that triangle would most likely meet in the center of Illinois somewhere around the state’s capital at Springfield--the home and final resting place of Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln was, and is buried at Oakridge Cemetery in Springfield in a large granite tomb that is capped with an enormous obelisk that rises almost one-hundred twenty feet in the air--so high up that it is a focal point for everyone’s attention for miles around.  It is a tomb that befits the stature of a man whom most consider to be America’s greatest President, and who, when he was assassinated in April of 1865 plunged an entire nation into deep mourning.  Without a doubt, in the years after the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was definitely the most famous American in history.  And Lincoln, his fame and his tomb, captivated the attention of criminal mastermind James “Big Jim” Kineally.

The plan was simple--and disgusting.  Kineally planned to break into Lincoln’s tomb and snatch his rotted corpse and bring it north where he would hide the body from the authorities and hold it for ransom amongst the desolate sand dunes of “Indiana’s Dune” country.  It would be impossible, Kineally figured, for anyone to find old Abe’s body in that desolate, ever-changing and sandy wasteland and the authorities would be forced to negotiate with him and meet his demands if they ever wanted to see the corpse of the greatest American president ever again.  Kineally hoped to be able to ransom Abraham Lincoln’s dead body--with a bullet hole still in its skull from John Wilkes Booth’s derringer and all--for the release of his master counterfeiter Benjamin Boyd and for $200,000 real U.S. dollars (the modern day equivalent of $6,000.000!) in the process.

Kineally’s plan was simple yet shocking; bold yet disgusting and guaranteed to get everyone’s attention, particularly during our nation’s Centennial celebration year of 1876.  But in order to pull off such a daring plan--kidnapping Abe Lincoln’s long dead body from the grave and holding it for ransom--even Irish Mob Boss James “Big Jim” Kineally needed some help.  He set about recruiting accomplices to help him secure his master engraver’s freedom and make his biggest fortune yet.  This need for help is what would prove to be the undoing of “Big Jim” Kineally and the would-be plot to snatch Abraham Lincoln’s body from the grave.

 “Big Jim” recruited Chicago native and bartender Terrence Mullins--one of his most loyal foot soldiers--and counterfeiter Jack Hughes who was Kineally’s second best engraver whose lack of skills was one of the reasons that “Big Jim” was so desperate to spring Benjamin Boyd from the penitentiary.

Abraham Lincoln's Tomb

Not only was 1876 the Centennial year for the United States of America but it was also a Presidential election year--the first one since the Civil War when every state in the Union could vote and it was a hotly contested campaign between the Republican candidate from Ohio Rutherford B. Hayes and an upstart Democratic challenger, the Governor of New York Samuel J. Tilden.  Hayes narrowly defeated Tilden in one the closest presidential elections in American history up to that point, and as it were, the election of 1876 would mark the end of Reconstruction in the south and the beginning of the Jim Crow Era after Hayes basically sold out the Republican Party to gain much needed votes from racists in the south, but all of that lay somewhat in the future.

For now, “Big Jim” Kineally planned to snatch Abe Lincoln’s body from the grave, with the assistance of his two accomplices Mullins and Hughes, while the population of Springfield, Illinois was distracted on election night November 7, 1876.  However, before his plan could go into action, “Big Jim” realized that he had one problem--neither he, nor any of his accomplices, knew anything at all about body-snatching.

The 19th century was a time when body-snatching--the act of stealing dead bodies from the grave--was a sort of criminal art.  Dead bodies could draw lucrative sums from medical schools, universities and scientific institutions at a time when many people still had moral reservations about dissection and when many states still had laws on the books that forbade studying human anatomy through the use of corpses.  So that, as medical science advanced, a market in corpses stolen from the grave sprang up and academia didn’t ask many questions about where these dead bodies came from.  What Kineally and his gang needed to pull off their audacious plan was a professional body-snatcher.

Only days before their plan was set to go into motion “Big Jim” Kineally found his expert body-snatcher, or so he thought, in the person of Louis Swegles, a petty crook and safe cracker in Illinois who was personally recruited by Kineally after word had gotten around the Chicago underworld that Swegles considered himself to be the best body-snatcher in all of Illinois.

With his gang all set on the afternoon of November 6, 1878 Kineally, Mullins, Hughes and the body-snatcher Swegles boarded a train in Chicago and headed south for Springfield where they planned to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body from his tomb and hold it for ransom on election night.  But unbeknownst to Kineally--his expert body-snatcher Louis Swegles was actually a plant who was in the employ of the United States Secret Service.

In an ironic twist of historical fate, the United States Secret Service had been created by an Executive Order of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865 the day before he was tragically assassinated by a bullet to the back of the head in Ford’s Theater.  Lincoln formed the Secret Service not to protect the President of the United States, or any other government officials, but to try and combat the rise in counterfeiting that threatened to ruin the American economy in the days after the Civil War.  When it was originally created the United States Secret Service was actually part of the Treasury Department and under the leadership of the Secretary of the Treasury.  It wasn’t until 1901 and the assassination of yet another American Chief Executive, in this case William McKinley, that the role of the Secret Service was expanded to include protection of the President and his family.

Unbeknownst to “Big Jim” when he boarded the train in Chicago he was already being watched by Secret Service agents--a group of whom boarded the same train with him and his gang and rode all the way down to Springfield, a journey of some two-hundred miles, after having been tipped off by Louis Swegles.

The Secret Service men were led by agents Patrick Tyrrell and Elmer Washburn and were accompanied by two detectives from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the nineteenth century precursor to the FBI.

Having been told by Louis Swegles that Kineally planned to snatch Lincoln’s body from the tomb sometime after sunset on Election Night, Tyrrell and Washburn showed up at Lincoln’s tomb a few hours before sunset on November 7, 1876.  The Secret Service men removed their socks and shoes, so as not to make a sound while moving around, and crept inside the granite tomb where the coffin of Abraham Lincoln lay.  Once inside the tomb, Tyrrell and his men shut the door and waited in pitch darkness and in complete silence.

Two hours passed, Tyrrell and the Secret Service men began to worry that maybe Kineally and his men had gotten cold feet and chickened out, but soon they heard shuffling outside Lincoln’s tomb and realized that Kineally and his gang of body-snatchers were indeed attempting to follow through with their plan.

The Secret Service agents held their breath, careful not to make the slightest sound that might give away the fact that they were already hiding within the tomb.  Quickly, Kineally and his crew set to work.  They filed away the iron lock that held down the lid of Abraham Lincoln’s sarcophagus, but they soon realized that they couldn't lift the five hundred pound thick mahogany and lead lined coffin of the dead President.  So, they began cutting off chunks of the coffin and attempted to brutally drag Abraham Lincoln’s decomposed corpse out of the sarcophagus.

Then there was a loud BANG!  A gunshot rang out and the sound echoed and reverberated in a deafening crescendo within the walls of the tomb.  Some accounts say that one of Tyrrell’s Secret Service agents had become nervous and twitchy and had accidentally discharged his revolver inside the tomb; some say that it was Tyrrell himself who had become so disgusted by what he was watching that he shot his weapon straight up into the air to force the would-be grave robbers to stop desecrating Abraham Lincoln’s corpse.

After that first gunshot the jumpy and barefoot Secret Service agents began blasting away with their revolvers inside the narrow confines of Abe Lincoln’s tomb.

Once the first gun was discharged, Kineally, Hughes and Mullins--no strangers to gun battles themselves-- stopped what they were doing and sprinted out of the tomb.  Tyrrell dashed into the dim light of the burial chamber and saw Lincoln’s coffin, but no immediate sign of the body snatchers.

Tyrrell’s fellow agent Elmer Washburn ran into the burial chamber himself with his gun drawn and shouted, “I’ve got the devils right here!”  But he was forced to stop in his tracks once all he saw was his partner Patrick Tyrrell standing there over Abraham Lincoln’s coffin.  It was at that exact moment that the Secret Service agents realized that they had been shooting at each other!

Lincoln Pictured with Members of the Pinkerton Agency 1864

“Big Jim” Kineally, Terrence Mullins and Patrick Hughes were able to slip away in the night and board the next train back to Chicago.  They didn’t steal Abe Lincoln’s body and hold it for ransom amidst the sand dunes of Indiana, but for a time anyway, they had gotten away.  Secret Service Agent Patrick Tyrrell would later call it, “The most unfortunate night I have ever experienced”

Eventually, the long arm of the law did catch up to Terrence Mullins and Patrick Hughes back in Chicago, but since technically, body-snatching was not officially a federal crime on the books at the time, both men were only charged with damaging Abraham Lincoln’s coffin ($75 total in damages to be exact) and sentenced to a year in state prison.  

As for James “Big Jim” Kineally, he was never formally charged nor arrested for the crime of attempting to steal Abe Lincoln’s corpse and hold it for ransom.  It should be kept in mind that “Big Jim” spelled his last name in a myriad number of ways and that it’s likely he either simply melted back into the landscape of the Chicago underworld or simply returned home to his native Ireland where he would have been completely safe from American authorities.

The body of Abraham Lincoln still rests in the same tomb beneath thousands of pounds of granite, concrete, metal and a really tall obelisk. at the Oak Ridge Cemetery in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois.