Lincoln's Grave Robbers: Prologue–Chapter 4

Iron shackles and chains bound his wrists and ankles.

They hurried back along the dark tracks, swinging lanterns, expecting to come quickly to the prisoner’s mangled body.

“But I fled to the woods, waited till all was quiet, and the train had gone, struggled along for hours, skulked and secreted myself, and with a stone finally smashed the iron shackles from my limbs.”

“But I fled to the woods, waited till all was quiet, and the train had gone, struggled along for hours, skulked and secreted myself, and with a stone finally smashed the iron shackles from my limbs.”

Then he moved to another town and bought a livery stable.

A powerfully built man with thick black hair, Tyrrell had spent his adult life chasing down crooks as a Chicago detective. Now forty-four, he was one of the newest operatives of the United States Secret Service.

Kinsey was known for his beautifully intricate engravings of landscapes.

It was less well known that with that same steady hand and attention to detail, he also cut plates to print counterfeit money.

The beautifully cut plates had taken about a year of painstaking labor to make.

He was to track down Ben Boyd and get him dead to rights—grab him with incriminating evidence on him.

The same happened with early paper currency, thanks to resourceful folks like Mary Butterworth of Rehoboth, Massachusetts.

Those who really cared about doing quality work took the extra time to give their coins a handled, tarnished look by rubbing them with sawdust and burning them with fire.

The process wasn’t technically challenging, but each coin took time, and each required genuine gold or silver.

Congress responded with the Legal Tender Act, and President Abraham Lincoln signed it into law. The new law gave the U.S. Treasury the power to print paper currency.

“After hearing the evidence in the case,” Tyrrell grumbled, “the judge ordered the jury to find Almiranda Boyd not guilty, it being conceded that she was the wife of Benjamin Boyd and that as such she had only done what was her duty to her husband by covering up his guilt as much as possible.”

Allie was acquitted, but the jury took just twenty minutes to find Ben Boyd guilty.

Thanks to descriptions in his prison records, we know he was just under six feet tall, with a fair complexion and light gray eyes.

He’d done time in prison for horse theft, and two long stints in the Illinois State Penitentiary for passing counterfeit cash.

When the coney was ready, he’d have the printer hide the stash in some predetermined spot—in a hollow log out in the country, or in a hole under a roadside rock.

For young tellers this was an inconvenience; for Big Jim it was a catastrophe.

Other engravers just weren’t as talented or meticulous.

Naturally, Kennally’s clients were not about to pay top dollar for lower-quality, riskier merchandise. They demanded steep discounts, and Big Jim had no choice but to agree.

In flush times the gang liked to brag that, thanks to them, there was more bogus than real money floating around Logan County. But business was slow now.

The missing body part was discovered the next day and everyone suspected the disgruntled gardener.

But Kennally would have a rock-solid alibi—he was in St. Louis on the night of the theft, with eyewitnesses to prove it.