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It's one of those rare events that is so ludicrous that, in hindsight, seems so bizarre that one wonders if it's a Mad magazine parody of Ripley's Believe it or Not. Yet, it is true: Criminals conspired to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from his tomb in Springfield in November 1876.

After Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, a dispute arose as to where the president was to be buried. His widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, was firmly resolved that the remains of her husband be returned to Illinois and entombed at the Oak Ridge Cemetery on the north side of Springfield.

Contrary members of the National Lincoln Monument Association instead preferred a site in downtown Springfield, the so-called “Mather Block.” (The Mather property and other nearby parcels ultimately become the grounds of the Illinois State Capitol area.)

Mrs. Lincoln was so perturbed at the challenges to her preference that she threatened to have Lincoln's remains shipped back to Washington and interred in a vault underneath the dome of the U.S. Capitol building. Founding father George Washington was to be buried there.

The widow's demands ultimately prevailed, and Lincoln was enshrined at her preferred place at Oak Ridge Cemetery.

The strange plot to steal Lincoln's body involved a group of notorious counterfeiters from Chicago. They planned to steal the body and bury it in the Indiana Dunes in exchange for a purported $200,000 ransom and release of one of their compatriots from the state penitentiary in Joliet.

Fortunately, word of the devious and macabre plot leaked out and law enforcement officials were waiting at the tomb for the grave robbers.

Yet the two thieves, Terrence Mullen and Jack Hughes, managed to elude the stakeout, and they escaped in the darkness after an exchange of errant gunshots. The author, Thomas Craughwell, describes the bungled crime scene:

“Scattered across the floor were the stolen ax, the broken hacksaw, the now-useless padlock, the lantern, and other tools; the carved marble slab had been shoved to one side; and most horrible of all, the coffin containing the body of Abraham Lincoln had been pulled about fifteen inches out of its sarcophagus. But Mullen and Hughes were gone.”

A few days after the break-in, the robbers were apprehended and returned to Springfield for trial. Ironically, one of the defendants' lawyers, Alfred Orendorff, worked previously as a junior attorney with Lincoln's old law partner, William Herndon.

The 1877 jury trial of the conspirators certainly couldn't withstand constitutional scrutiny today. The voir dire of 77 men resulted in an all-male jury panel of 12. Mullen and Hughes were convicted of larceny and conspiracy and sentenced to a year at Joliet.

Craughwell does a commendable job of putting the attempted grave robbing in the context of the 1800s. Money was the primary motivation. The need for cadavers for medical school training purposes was a significant reason for stealing recently deceased remains.

In 1878, less than two years after the attempted theft of Lincoln's body, the corpse of President William Henry Harrison's son was stolen from his grave in Ohio and sold to the Medical College of Ohio in Cincinnati. The uproar over the incident led a movement for legislation to permit medical schools to obtain unclaimed bodies from morgues.

Concerns over securing the remains of Lincoln prompted efforts to renovate the memorial. In 1901, the monument was rebuilt, partly due to its previous shoddy and debilitated construction.

Although Lincoln's oldest son, Robert Lincoln, was still alive at the time, he did not attend the final interment. Despite Robert's instructions, the coffin of the 16th president was reopened to assure the small, private audience that it was indeed Abraham Lincoln.

Among those in attendance was 13-year-old Fleetwood Lindley, son of one of the last surviving members of the Lincoln Guard of Honor. The ad hoc Guard of Honor was an “exclusive club dedicated to keeping the secret of Lincoln's grave.”

After the attempted theft, Lincoln's coffin was buried at undisclosed location in the monument to thwart another attempt by would-be grave robbers. Justifiably, concerns lingered over whether Lincoln's body was still located inside the memorial, so the coffin was opened again:

“There, unmistakably, was Abraham Lincoln, perfectly preserved — the wart on his cheek, the tuft of beard on his chin, the unruly black hair. Some of the white chalky makeup that Thomas Lynch, the undertaker, had applied to the president's face in 1865 was still visible; but where the makeup had fallen away, Fleetwood and his fellow witnesses could see that Lincoln's skin was the color of bronze. Lincoln looked like any of the sculptures that stood in so many city parks around the country.”

The darkened appearance of Lincoln can be attributed to the phenomenon of coutrecoup, where the effects of a gunshot wound to the back of Lincoln's head were also shown opposite the bullet's impact, resulting in the look of a severely bruised face.

In 1963, a reporter for Life magazine interviewed Lindley in a hospital room. Craughwell notes that “Three days after that interview, Fleetwood Lindley, the last person to look upon the face of Abraham Lincoln, died.”

It is no small wonder why the monuments of those presidents who have died after Lincoln are now buried in massive, secure and guarded memorials. Craughwell's short book is an intriguing contribution to Lincoln lore.