Astray by Emma Donoghue

Author:Emma Donoghue
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781443410816
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2012-11-21T17:00:00+00:00

The Body Swap

“Jim Morrissey” was the alias of one Lewis Cass Swegles (born in Michigan in 1849), a thief turned “roper” (undercover agent) for the Secret Service, who drew a wage of five dollars a day for his infiltration of a gang of counterfeiters who broke into Lincoln’s tomb in 1876. This story owes a lot to Bonnie Stahlman Speer’s The Great Abraham Lincoln Hijack (1997) and Thomas J. Craugh-well’s Stealing Lincoln’s Body (2007).

Charged with conspiracy and larceny on Swegles’s testimony, Terence Mullen and John Hughes faced up to eight years in Illinois’s Joliet State Prison, but the jury sentenced them to just one year. After the trial, ten of the twelve jurymen sent a letter to the papers declaring that Swegles deserved a sentence of three years himself for entrapment of Hughes and Mullen. Soon after release, Hughes was sent back to Joliet for three years for passing counterfeit; Mullen, arrested on similar charges in 1880, informed against his former partner Big Jim Kinealy, who had sold Mullen’s bar and vanished with the proceeds.

By 1880 Swegles was in Joliet himself, serving twelve years for burglary. He had a wife, Laura Baker (married back in 1872). He died in New York in 1896 at the age of forty-six.

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