The Annals of Unsolved Crime (3 page)

It should also be recognized that conspiracies need not resemble the intricately crafted intrigues found in movies and novels. They come in a multitude of different forms; some are
plotted in advance and other are enacted opportunely after the fact to take advantage of circumstances. The 1972–1973 Watergate scandal, for example, involved a number of different conspiracies. The first, which grew out of a covert operation called Gemstone, involved seven conspirators, all of whom had formerly worked for the CIA or the FBI. All went to prison. The second conspiracy was the after-the-fact cover-up organized by the White House, and its exposure led to conviction of Attorney General John Mitchell and ten other high-ranking officials. A third possible conspiracy involved government officials clandestinely distributing protected data, including FBI 201 files, to select journalists in order to weaken, if not destroy, the Nixon Administration. That the release was “deliberately coordinated,” rather than a spontaneous act of whistle-blowing, is suggested by CIA memoranda, written by CIA officers Martin Lukoskie and Eric Eisenstadt (published as an appendix in Jim Hougan’s book
Secret Agenda
), one “for the record” and the other for the CIA’s deputy director of plans. The memos discuss how Lukoskie’s operation “has now established a ‘back door entry’ to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm, which is representing the Democratic Party in its suit for damages resulting from the Watergate incident,” and had also managed to feed stories to the
Washington Post
via Bob Woodward on the understanding that there be no attribution to the CIA operation. If the purpose of this effort by an intelligence service was to unseat elected officials, it would constitute a conspiracy within a conspiracy.

This brings us to the final section, induced miscarriages of justice. When someone corrupts the legal system by fabricating evidence or otherwise usurps it to damage an opponent, this produces a crime within a crime that may go undetected. And once such a perversion of justice is established as the “truth” in the public mind, the situation is not easily remedied. One of the most notorious examples of this crime-within-a-crime is the
imprisonment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus on Devil’s Island. The affair began in Paris in 1894 as an espionage case after French military intelligence discovered that a traitor with access to documents from the General Staff was in contact with the German embassy. The mole hunt immediately focused on Captain Dreyfus, the only officer of Jewish descent on the French Army’s General Staff. In 1895, he was court-martialed, sentenced to life imprisonment, and put in solitary confinement on the penal colony of Devil’s Island. The following year, French intelligence discovered that the mole was actually Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. But instead of suffering the embarrassment of exonerating Dreyfus, the intelligence agency concealed the discovery, Esterhazy was allowed to escape to Britain, and an intelligence officer forged documents further implicating Dreyfus. In 1899, in response to public outcry, Dreyfus was given a second trial and, on the basis of the fabricated evidence, re-convicted. It was not until 1906 that Dreyfus was fully exonerated. But there was another crime here that was not pursued: the corruption of justice by French intelligence officers that destroyed Dreyfus’ career. Such perversions of justice take many forms, including frame-ups, setups (illegal entrapments), and deliberate prosecutorial abuses of power.

The mysteries in
The Annals of Unsolved Crimes
include political assassinations, kidnappings, airplane crashes, arson, vanishings, mass murders, serial killings, poisonings, nuclear-weapon smuggling, and bioterrorism. Whereas some of the cases, such as that of the Reichstag fire, changed the course of world history, all captured the public imagination through intense media coverage, speculation, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories. For this book, I have included both cases that I have investigated personally and for which I have done extensive interviews, and historic cases in which I have relied on books, court documents, and archival material. I have divided each unsolved crime into three parts: a narration of the
basic evidence in the case, a presentation of the basic theories, and my own assessment, based on my view of the best sense of the current state of the evidence. The length of the chapters varies since more convoluted cases, such as that of the headless Ukrainian journalist, require a longer presentation. The common thread running through them all is the difficulty of establishing truth in high-profile crimes.

PART ONE
“LONERS”: BUT WERE
THEY ALONE?

CHAPTER 1
THE ASSASSINATION OF
PRESIDENT LINCOLN

Shortly after the American Civil War came to an end, President Abraham Lincoln was murdered. The assassination had immense consequences; it disastrously delayed the reconstruction of the South for nearly a century. The man who shot Lincoln was John Wilkes Booth. Was he a lone assassin or part of a conspiracy aimed at changing history?

At about 10:15 p.m. on Friday, April 14, 1865, in Washington, D.C., assassins launched nearly simultaneous attacks against President Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward. At Ford’s Theater, John Wilkes Booth, who was then one of the world’s celebrated actors, slipped into the unguarded president’s box and fatally shot President Lincoln in the head. At the Washington home of Secretary of State Seward, Lewis Powell, who had served in the Confederate secret service, stabbed Seward—but, unlike Lincoln, Seward survived the attack. A third alleged member of the conspiracy, George Atzerodt, who owned a carriage repair business in Maryland, stalked Vice President Andrew Johnson with a loaded pistol that night and was arrested. Powell was arrested at the home of Mary Surratt in Surrattsville, Maryland. Surratt was also arrested for harboring the accused would-be assassins. Meanwhile, David Herold, who had gone with Powell to Seward’s home that night, escaped with Booth from Surrattsville to Virginia.

On April 26, Federal troops trapped Booth and Herold in a barn in Virginia. In the ensuing gun battle, Booth was killed and Herold captured.

Meanwhile, Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln as president, declared that there was “evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice that the atrocious murder of the late president, and the attempted assassination of the Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, were incited, concerted and procured,” by leaders of the defeated Confederate States. They placed a $100,000 reward on the head of its president, Jefferson Davis, and established a Military Commission to mete out justice.

On May 1, 1865, eight alleged conspirators, including Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt, were tried before that Commission. Over the course of seven weeks, the Commission heard 371 witnesses. According to the prosecution’s witnesses, the Confederate Congress had appropriated five million dollars in 1864 for covert operations run out of Canada by Jacob Thompson, the former secretary of the interior, and Clement Clay, a former senator. One prosecution witness described a failed covert operation sponsored by the Confederate States to deliver clothing that had been “carefully infected in Bermuda with yellow fever” to the White House. Another prosecution witness testified that the goal of the April plot was not only to kill Lincoln but also to “leave the government entirely without a head” by killing those in the line of succession. To this end, Thompson allegedly met in Montreal with John Wilkes Booth and John Surratt, Jr., the son of Mary Surratt (he escaped to Canada after the assassination), and approved plans to attack Lincoln on April 6, 1865. According to a Canadian banker’s testimony, Thompson withdrew $184,000 from the more than $600,000 in his private Montreal account just after the meeting with Booth. The prosecution also introduced a coded letter found in Booth’s possession, which, according to its forensic experts, was traced to a cipher machine recovered from the
code room in the Confederate headquarters in Richmond. That cipher putatively authorized an earlier plot to abduct Lincoln on March 17, 1865. George Atzerodt admitted at the trial that he had planned, along with Herold, Booth, and other conspirators, to abduct Lincoln as he was returning from a matinee performance at the Campbell Hospital on the outskirts of Washington. (The scheme failed when the president canceled his trip.)

The prosecutor said in his summation that the evidence showed “that John Wilkes Booth was in this conspiracy; that John Surratt was in this conspiracy; and that Jefferson Davis and his several agents named, in Canada, were in this conspiracy.”

The Military Commission then found Powell, Herold, Mary Surratt, and Atzerodt (who had admitted his involvement in the earlier plot) guilty of participating in the April conspiracy and sentenced them to death by hanging. On July 7, 1865, the four condemned prisoners were hanged (making Mary Surratt the first woman ever executed by the federal government). The other four defendants were found guilty of helping the assassins escape and sentenced to prison.

John Surratt, the remaining conspirator, was captured in Egypt in November 1866. By that time, military commission trials had been ruled unconstitutional, so he was tried in 1867 by a state court in Maryland. Since the statute of limitations had expired on all the lesser charges, he was tried only for murdering Lincoln. As part of his defense, he freely admitted that he had been a Confederate spy and had conspired with Booth to kidnap Lincoln, but he denied any involvement in the subsequent assassination. When the jury failed to agree on a verdict, the judge declared a mistrial, and Surratt was set free.

In light of the momentous consequences of the assassination and the flawed judicial process of the Military Commission, there was no shortage of theories. To begin with, there was the theory of the Commission itself that John Wilkes Booth and
his five fellow plotters were part of a covert action designed to decapitate the federal government by killing the president, vice president, and secretary of state. According to this theory, as articulated by Secretary of War Stanton, this assassination plot was authorized by the high command of the Confederate States and paid for through its intelligence arm in Canada. An alternative theory subscribed to by many, if not all, Civil War historians is that there was an earlier failed plot to kidnap Lincoln that was hijacked by Booth. According to this theory, the Confederacy had backed an earlier covert action in March 1865 to ransom Lincoln for the exchange of Confederate prisoners of war. The Confederacy authorized the transfer of money to Surratt for this purpose via a ciphered message and even positioned troops to transport the abducted president to the South. Booth, John Surratt, Powell, Herold, and Atzerodt were all participants in this plot (as Atzerodt and Surratt admitted at their trials). When the kidnapping plot failed, Booth deceived or coerced the others into participating in his unauthorized assassination. There is also a theory implicating Jesuit priests in the assassination. General Thomas Harris, who had served as a prosecutor on the Military Commission, advanced this theory in his 1897 book
Rome’s Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
. According to this theory, John Surratt, who had been convicted in absentia and was one of the most pursued fugitives in American history, was smuggled out of America by Jesuit priests to the Vatican in Rome, where he was enrolled under false documentation in the Swiss Guard and, when discovered there, allowed to escape to Egypt. This anti-papist theory has received no support from modern historians.

My assessment is that the attacks on President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward on the night of April 14, 1865, as well as the planned attack that night on Vice President Johnson, were part of a coordinated plot aimed at eliminating those in the immediate line of succession to the presidency. It was, in
modern terms, a decapitation strike. There can be little doubt that the perpetrators were acting in concert: two of them, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold, the latter of whom was an accomplice in the attempted assassination of Seward, escaped together to Virginia and engaged in a gun battle with their pursuers. George Atzerodt, who had the job of shooting the vice president, had Booth’s bank book in his possession and, just before he was hanged, confessed to the minister attending him that Booth had told him in advance of the plan to shoot Lincoln and had designated Herold as his backup to assassinate the vice president. Lewis Powell, who stabbed Secretary of State Seward, was placed by witnesses at a meeting with Booth and Herold at the Surratt boarding house, and at his trial, the defense offered by his lawyer was that he was a soldier following orders. We also know that Booth, Herold, Powell, and Atzerodt had been involved in a plot to kidnap Lincoln (which Atzerodt described in detail in his confession) less than a month earlier.

The remaining question of whether this conspiracy was state-sponsored by the Confederacy is more difficult to answer. We know that as Lincoln was about to begin his second term in 1864, the Confederate Congress allocated five million dollars to a Confederate Secret Service operation in Canada run by Jacob Thompson and Clement Clay. It sponsored a number of lethal covert acts in the United States from 1864 to 1865, including a plan to spread the smallpox virus and blow up the White House. We further know that Thompson met with Booth in Montreal in the fall of 1864. I believe that a strong indication of the close relationship between the Confederate Secret Service and Booth is a ciphered letter sent to Booth on October 13, 1864, asking whether Booth’s “friends would be set to work as directed.” After the assassination, the cipher was matched to one used by the Confederate Secret Service in Richmond and Canada. Since intelligence services do not share their ciphers with people not involved in their activities, it seems likely that
Booth was acting for the Confederate Secret Service, at least in October 1864. This relationship may have extended to the plot by Booth and his associates to kidnap Lincoln on March 17, 1865, since Confederate military records show that on that day its elite cavalry unit’s troops were positioned along the route on which Booth planned to transport the kidnapped president to the South. Certainly, his co-conspirators in the kidnap plot believed that it was backed by the Confederacy.