With all that has already been written about President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, one of the little known stories is the case of the only successful conspirator, John Harrison Surratt, the son of Mary Surratt, who was hanged for her part in the crime. The Last Lincoln Conspirator is the true story of John Surratt, who became the most wanted man in America after the death of John Wilkes Booth's and was the only conspirator to escape conviction. The capture and killing of Booth twelve days after he shot Lincoln and the fate of Booth's other accomplices are familiar history. Four accomplices, including Surratt's mother, were convicted and hanged, and four were jailed. John Surratt alone managed to evade capture for twenty months and, once put on trial, to evade prison. The first full-length treatment of Surratt's escape, capture, and trial, this book provides fascinating details about his flight through Canada, England, France, the Papal States, and eventual capture in Egypt. Surratt's desperate journey and the bitter legal proceedings against him that bizarrely led to his freedom hold the reader's attention from first to last page....

In the tradition of great tales of men against the sea, this story offers a compelling look at courage and commitment in the face of certain tragedy. It is a powerful blend of human drama and real-life naval operations, but unlike most books in the genre, its heroes are airmen not seamen, and most survived their ordeal. Published on the twentieth-fifth anniversary of Alfa Foxtrot 586's fatal mission as a tribute to those lost, the account was written by a naval aviator who has flown the same aircraft on the same mission from the same air base. The aircraft is a P-3 Orion on station during a sensitive mission off the Kamchatka Peninsula in the north Pacific. The time is mid-day on 26 October 1978. Andy Jampoler takes readers into the cockpit of the turboprop as a propeller malfunction turns into an engine fire, eventually forcing Jerry Grigsby to ditch his patrol plane into the empty, mountainous seas west of the Aleutian Islands. His fourteen crewmembers, strapped in their seats, expect the worst--and get it. The aircraft goes down in just ninety seconds, taking one of the three rafts with it. A second raft, terribly overcrowded, soon begins to leak.

The flight crew's desperate battle to survive is told with the authority, drama, and sensitivity that only someone with the author's background could provide. He draws on interviews with survivors, searchers, and even the master of the Soviet fishing trawler that saved the living and recovered the bodies of the dead. He also draws on recordings of radio communications, messages in the files of the state and defense departments, and the patrol squadron's own investigation of the ditching. Everyone who likes survival epics and enjoys reading sea and air adventures will be entertained by this engrossing true story. 240 pages. 11 photographs. 5 line drawings. 3 maps. Notes. Bibliography. Hardcover. 6 x 9 inches....

Despite all that has been written about the April 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the story of John Surratt--the only conspirator who got away--remains untold and largely unknown. The capture and shooting of John Wilkes Booth twelve days after he shot Lincoln is a well-known and well-covered story. The fate of the eight other accomplices of Booth has also been widely written about. Four, including Surratt's mother, Mary, were convicted and hanged, and four were jailed. John Surratt alone managed to evade capture for twenty months and escape punishment once he was put on trial. In this tale of adventure and mystery, Andrew Jampoler tells what happened to that last conspirator, who after Booth's death became the most wanted man in America.

As the first full-length treatment of Surratt's escape, capture, and trial, the book provides fascinating details about his flight from New York, where he was on a Confederate spy mission scouting the huge Union prisoner of war camp in Elmira, through eastern Canada to a hideout in Liverpool, England, and on to France and the Papal States. His twenty-month flight, including nearly one year of enlisted service in the Papal Zouaves (the pope's army), is a remarkable adventure through mid-century Europe and locations unknown to most Americans of the time. Despite an uncontrollable tendency to babble to strangers about who he really was and what he had done, Surratt, frequently sheltered by sympathetic Roman Catholic priests, managed to stay at large during a flight that took him across three continents and over the Atlantic Ocean and half the Mediterranean Sea. Finally caught in Alexandria, Egypt, he was returned to Washington to stand trial in 1867.

Jampoler brings Surratt to life as he traces the wily young man's remarkable journey and the bitter legal proceedings against him that bizarrely led to his freedom. After his trial, Surratt lived out his life peacefully in Baltimore, marrying a relative of Francis Scott Key and dying at the age of seventy-two. The book's cast of characters includes a menagerie of the nineteenth century's most colorful personalities....