The Plot

In 1864, a 41-year-old woman named Mary Surratt was running a boarding house in Washington, D. C. One of the most famous actors in the country began visiting her – which led to her becoming known as the woman who “kept the nest that hatched the egg." Kate Clifford Larson’s book is The Assassin’s Accomplice. Join our newsletter by 2/28/26 to be entered to win a free year of Criminal Plus: ⁠thisiscriminal.com/newsletter⁠. (Additional rules apply.) Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:18Speaker 02

  In 1863, a widow named Mary Serot was running a tavern in a small town in Maryland, just outside of Washington DC. There was a post office in the same building. Her youngest son, John, was the postmaster. He was also a spy for the Confederate Army. How much did she know of what John was doing?

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Oh, I think she knew everything.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  This is historian Kate Clifford Larson.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  You know, some people say, "Oh, she couldn't have known what he was doing." Of course, he was like 18 years old. She knew everything he was doing. And she approved of it because she did not want the Union to win.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Mary grew up in Maryland on a tobacco farm where her family owned enslaved people. Her father died when she was two, and after, her mother ran the farm. She never remarried. Mary grew up Episcopalian, but converted to Catholicism when she was a teenager.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Mary met her husband, John Serot, in 1839. They married the next year. They had three children. Her husband drank and gambled a lot. He racked up a lot of debt. But eventually, he saved up enough money to build a tavern.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  So he opened this tavern, and it became very busy very quickly. They had a wheelwright that would take care of people's carriages and barns for horses. And so it was very, very successful, the bar and the inn itself. And sadly, John became the most frequent customer of the bar in the tavern.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  In 1862, John Serot died. By that point, Mary was already doing most of the work, running the tavern. It was always busy, and often full of Confederate supporters, who knew they were safe there. A family friend said that Mary "earnestly and conscientiously defended and justified the Southern cause." What was it like in Maryland at that time during the Civil War?

• 3:33Speaker 03

  So Maryland stayed in the Union. There was a lot of negotiating to make that happen, because Maryland was a slave state. Now, Southern Maryland, the part of Maryland that's closest to Washington, D.C., had the most enslaved people out of any region of Maryland at the time. So it was a mixed state. Northern Maryland, north of Baltimore, had very few enslaved people, more northern kind of sympathies. And then Southern Maryland had very strong Confederate sympathies. So the state was split, but Lincoln and his administration were able to keep it in the Union.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  But that didn't mean that people with Confederate sympathies were not trying to thwart the efforts of Lincoln and his administration during the war.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  The Serots had also owned enslaved people. One of them had allegedly burned down the Serots' house and then ran away.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Several of them fled the tavern and took off. So that was very upsetting to Mary. As a white woman, she had more status than in a slave person or a free black person. And she liked that. She was a racist and she was a confederate. She wanted slavery to continue.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  In 1862, Mary's oldest son, Isaac, left to join the Confederate army. And her younger son, John, started delivering messages for the Confederacy. John used his position at the post office to move coded messages that were sent to him there. When he got certain letters, he would take out a hidden envelope and bring it to the person it was for. Sometimes he would hide messages between the wooden boards of his carriage, other times in the heel of his boot. He'd sneak out to Confederate boats on the Potomac River with information about where the Union Army was going.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  The Union could not patrol 24 hours a day, every mile of that river, all the time. So people had a great business taking Confederate sympathizers, spies, et cetera, back and forth across the Potomac and the other rivers. So it was wartime. It was difficult to watch everybody and keep an eye on everybody.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  But one day in November 1863, John was caught by federal investigators. He was fired from his job as postmaster for disloyalty. He spent a few days in jail, but was released. A new postmaster was hired, who was not a Confederate supporter. John decided to start carrying the secret letters himself, full-time, bypassing the post office. He would travel to the Confederate capital in Richmond, pick up messages, and then take them north to Canada, where the Confederacy had established a base.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Spies like John hid coded messages and photographs in buttons, shoes, and clothing in case they were searched.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  In 1864, Mary decided to move with John and her daughter Anna to Washington DC, where they owned a townhouse. She started renting out rooms.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  I think it was a strategic move on her part, and they could have borders and look like a respectable house, and she would be the woman running the boarding house. And I think it made it easier for John to go back and forth and connect with people in Washington DC who were spies, who were in government. There were Confederate spies who had jobs in the government, and they were sending information to Richmond, Virginia. So I think it worked out for him very nicely that they moved into Washington DC.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Soon, the boarding house became a meeting place for John and his friends, some of whom he had met through his work delivering messages. One man started coming over a lot and became friends with Mary, too. His name was John Wilkes Booth. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. John Wilkes Booth was born in Maryland. He came from a family of actors. His father, Junius, and two of his brothers were also actors.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  John made his own stage debut when he was 17 years old, after his father died. His brother Edwin was known as the more precise actor in the family, but John was considered the more passionate one. One actress said, "He has the fire, the dash, the touch of strangeness." He was called by some "the handsomest man in Washington." Walt Whitman wrote of his acting, "I thought of real genius."

• 8:49Speaker 02

  How famous is John Wilkes Booth at this point?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  He is so famous. He's like the most famous actor in the country at the time. He had started acting in the early 1850s. He wasn't very notable at the time, but he really worked on his craft. And he became quite skilled and he was dashing and handsome. And really that he was a public person. And so he really developed a tremendous following.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  In April 1861, when the Civil War began, John Wilkes Booth was performing in Albany. He called the Confederates attacking Fort Sumter, quote, "heroic."

• 9:32Speaker 03

  He did not believe in equality. He thought that African Americans were supposed to be slaves. He was devoted to that concept, which is kind of odd because his family hadn't been that strongly committed. Particularly, one of his brothers was more of a northern sympathizer, a Union sympathizer. But he was obsessed. He really was obsessed.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  He had promised his mother that he would not enlist in the Confederate Army. But by 1864, he wanted to do more.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  John Wilkes Booth is becoming more and more furious and frustrated. And he wants the Union to lose. He wants the Confederacy to win. So he starts kind of dreaming up this scheme of how they're going to get a group of people together to help him execute on this plan to kidnap Abraham Lincoln.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  What did they think they were going to get out of kidnapping Lincoln?

• 10:27Speaker 03

  They were going to ransom him for the freedom of all the Confederate soldiers in northern prisons. And they thought that that would rejuvenate the failing Confederacy at the time because there were, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of Confederate prisoners. I mean, it was kind of a wacky plan, but they were devoted to it. They thought it would work. It certainly would have shocked the nation.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  John Wilkes Booth's plan was to kidnap President Lincoln in Washington and smuggle him through Maryland to the Potomac River. Then he and several conspirators would put him on a boat.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  They knew that Lincoln was a tall guy. They needed a few guys to help them get him into a boat and get him across to Virginia and then ransom him.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  John Wilkes Booth started spending a lot of time in southern Maryland, meeting with Confederate spies and looking for places that could be safe houses along the way to the Potomac. He learned that the Serat's Tavern was known as a safe place for Confederates. A mutual friend introduced him to John Serat.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  It was December of 1864 that John Serat Jr. met John Wilkes Booth in Washington DC. It was around Christmas time. And from then on, the plan really took off rather quickly. John Wilkes Booth brought in a couple of his friends from childhood. John Serat brought in some of his friends from childhood. The people that they brought in had no experience, really, with firearms or planning kidnappings. They didn't have much money, which now, when you think about it, is kind of ridiculous. But these are the people that they trusted and they brought in. This is how the plan started to grow.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Soon, John Wilkes Booth began arranging for people to stay at the Serat's Boarding House in Washington as they made plans. Some of them stayed for just a night and others for weeks. One of John Serat's childhood friends, who also lived at the Boarding House, a man named Louis Weichman, asked Mary who all these new people were. She told him that John was hiring them for dirty work. When asked what she meant, she said, "to clean his horses."

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Kate Clifford Larson says that John Wilkes Booth came to the boarding house almost every day. If John Serot wasn't home, he would sit with Mary. One of the boarders in the house said that Mary Serot and John Wilkes Booth would talk for hours together. Mary's daughter Anna kept a photo of Booth. Her brother complained that when Booth came to visit, he would always hear the women scampering to get ready.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  It's kind of remarkable, when you think about it. The most famous actor in the country is showing up at this boarding house in Washington, DC. And, you know, it's just, everybody, the boarders in the house, and not all of them were Confederate sympathizers in the house, but they just, they loved him and they thought, this is the coolest thing, that John Wilkes Booth is coming and having dinner with us and entertaining us.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  At the beginning of 1865, John Wilkes Booth started tracking President Lincoln's schedule. President Lincoln often went to see plays, especially at Ford's Theater. John Wilkes Booth had performed there many times, and he asked the owner to let him in to look around. He proposed kidnapping Lincoln the next time he went to see a show there. But two of his friends didn't like the idea. They said it could not be done without someone getting killed. On March 16th, John Wilkes Booth heard from a friend that President Lincoln was going

• 14:29Speaker 02

  to see a show the next day at an army hospital. Booth planned to intercept Lincoln's carriage. John Serot would take over and drive it to Maryland.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Kate says on the 17th of March, everyone met at Mary's boarding house. And John Wilkes Booth told them where to go and what to do once they had captured Lincoln.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  So Booth and his co-conspirators set themselves up along this road on the day that Lincoln was supposed to be there. And it turns out that at the last minute, Lincoln changed his mind and didn't go. And it just infuriated the co-conspirators, but particularly John Wilkes Booth himself.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  When John Serat Jr. came home, he went to his friend Louis Weikman, who lived at the boarding house. Louis Weikman said that John was waving a gun around and told him, "I will shoot anyone that comes into this room. My prospect is gone. My hopes are blighted."

• 15:33Speaker 02

  15 minutes later, John Wilkes Booth came in looking for John Serat. They went into another room to talk. Louis Weikman said that's when he began to suspect that they had, quote, "some hidden purpose."

• 15:48Speaker 02

  John Wilkes Booth stayed in Washington for one more day. He was scheduled to perform the next day at Ford's Theater. After the show, he left for New York City. But he hadn't given up on trying to help the Confederacy, which was about to lose the war.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  He just was in a complete panic and so angry that he'd started planning and scheming what his next step was going to be. And that turned out to be a plan to assassinate Lincoln. And it involved getting Mary to help.

• 16:24Speaker 02

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• 18:49Speaker 02

  Historian Kate Clifford Larson says when John Wilkes Booth came back to Washington, DC, he began gathering supplies for his new plan to assassinate the president.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  John Wilkes Booth decided he needed spy glasses and he wanted liquor, money, and food and things like that, and more weapons stored at the Serat Tavern for the evening when he decided he was going to assassinate Lincoln.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  John Serat had gone to Canada. Before he left, he'd taken weapons and ammunition to his family's tavern in Maryland. He hid them in the walls and under the floorboards. Mary started making lots of trips to the tavern, too. Once she asked her son's friend, Louis Weikman, who also lived at the boarding house, to take her there. She told him she was going to collect on a loan to a neighbor. But on the way, they stopped on a road just outside of town to talk to a man named John Lloyd. He had rented the tavern from Mary when she moved to Washington.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Mary asked John Lloyd about the weapons hidden at the tavern and told him someone would be coming to get them soon. And then, on April 14, John Wilkes Booth went to pick up his mail at Ford's Theater, and he heard that President Lincoln would be attending a play there that night. John Wilkes Booth met with two other men to go over their plans.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Part of the conspiracy was to kill Lincoln, his vice president Andrew Johnson, Secretary William Henry Seward, and then General Grant. He wanted to make sure that the leadership of the Union was completely decimated.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  And on that day, where was Mary Serot?

• 20:49Speaker 03

  She was busy trying to help. She went to the tavern to deliver the last items that Booth needed. Booth did come by and see her at least once during that day, and then he took off. He was busy making plans throughout the day with people at Ford's Theater, who didn't know what he was planning on doing. But he was such a famous actor, and he could go in and out of the theater and do whatever he wanted and talk to whoever he wanted to because he was so famous.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  That night, one of the men working with John Wilkes Booth, a man who went by the name Louis Payne, went to Secretary of State William Henry Seward's house.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Seward was recovering from a horrific carriage accident, and he had broken his shoulder and his jaw. So he was bedridden. And Louis Payne appeared at the door, claiming that he was a delivery person from the pharmacy with medication for the secretary. And the servants there in the house and Seward's sons were there, and they didn't want Payne to come in. But he pushed his way through. He stabbed a few people, and then he got into Seward's bedroom and started attacking him. But Seward fell off the bed, between the bed and the wall.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  And it was difficult for Payne to keep attacking him. And the brace, he had this large metal brace around his head and neck and shoulder to keep it all in place because he had broken so many bones. That prevented the blade from the knife that Payne was using from penetrating him enough to kill him. So Payne, thinking he had killed Seward, fled the house and went to hide in a cemetery until things had calmed down.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Another man was supposed to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson. It also didn't go as planned.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  That co-conspirator got drunk at the bar and didn't wait around to try to kill the Vice President who was staying at a local hotel.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  When John Wilkes Booth arrived at Ford's Theatre, a stagehand held his horse for him.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Booth goes in the theatre as the performance is going on, and he goes up to the private box where Lincoln and his wife and other people are seated watching the play. And he sneaks in and starts attacking the President, shoots him in the head.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  And then he yells out to the audience, and he leaps from the box and jumps down to the stage. Now, he had spurs on his boot, and it caught the American flag decoration that was spread across the box, and he crashed sort of on the stage. And, you know, everyone is in shock, they're not sure what's happening. Booth broke his leg. But he limps off, he goes behind and out into the alley, and Booth jumps on his horse and races away. And inside, they realize that Lincoln has been shot and other people have been hurt.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Lincoln was badly wounded. Doctors took him to a boarding house across the street from the theatre to treat him.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  That night, Mary Serot was at home. Some of the boarders noticed she seemed nervous.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  She just seems odd, and she says strange things. And finally, she tells everybody they must go back to their rooms, that she needs quiet. So they all go to bed. Now, once Lincoln has been shot, the police are out looking for any clues on who these people were that caused this. And where's John Wilkes Booth? Because people did recognize him when he jumped down on the stage. So the police actually come to her door at about 11:30 that night and ask to search the house, because they had heard that Booth had visited the house and that there might be other co-conspirators there. But they found nothing, so they left.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  But the next day, Mary's boarder, Louis Weigman, who had begun to suspect something strange about her friendship with John Wilkes Booth, decided to go to the police.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Louis Weigman realized, uh-oh, this is more serious. And the following morning, Saturday morning, Lincoln had just died, and he went and reported what he knew.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  He told police all about the visitors to the Serat's boarding house, including John Wilkes Booth and Louis Payne.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Two days later, the police came back to the boarding house.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  And they start inquiring, you know, what was going on here? Who were these people? And she kept saying that she didn't know anything. Well, then there's a knock on the door. And it's like 11 o'clock at night. So one of the detectives opens the door. And there's Louis Payne. And he'd been hiding out in the cemetery since his attack on Seward two nights before. And they said to him, who are you and what are you here for? And he tried to lie. He said that he was there to check with Mrs. Serat because he had been hired to do some yard work for her. And so he thought he'd get an early start. And of course, the detectives are like, early start? It's like 11:30 at night. What are you doing?

• 26:29Speaker 03

  So they make him come in the house. And they bring Mary Serat over into the hallway. And they ask her, does she know him? And she very dramatically raises up her arm and her hand and says, I swear to God that I do not know who this person is. And the detectives thought that that was so bizarre, her behavior, they knew immediately that she knew who the guy was, and she was lying.

• 27:00Speaker 02

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• 29:17Speaker 02

  Police took Mary Serot, her daughter Anna, and Louis Payne to the police station for questioning. When they took Mary in for questioning, what did she say?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  She was very defiant and haughty, and she was trying to protect her son. So she had no concern that she would be in trouble. So she obfuscated, and she just danced around. And that, of course, infuriated some of the police detectives. But, you know, they just felt the answers weren't adequate.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  The police asked her about John Wilkes Booth's visits. She said he didn't discuss politics much. She said she was shocked by his attack on President Lincoln. While she was being interviewed, the police searched Louis Payne. They found bloodstains on his clothing and that he was wearing boots with the name John Wilkes Booth inside. The police brought a servant from Secretary of State William Seward's house to the station.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  He sees Payne, and he says, "That's the man. That's the man who attacked Secretary Seward." So it just started snowballing from there.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Mary Serot was arrested and jailed at a prison at the old Capitol Building that had been used for military prisoners during the Civil War. The police had arrested six people involved in John Wilkes Booth's conspiracy. They couldn't find John Serot Jr. He was in Canada. John Wilkes Booth had been on the run since he shot Lincoln. He had stopped at Mary Serot's tavern and picked up a bottle of whiskey, spy glasses, and guns. He reportedly said, "I am pretty certain that we've assassinated the president." Almost two weeks later, on April 26,

• 31:11Speaker 02

  he was discovered hiding in a tobacco barn in Virginia. He was quickly surrounded by federal detectives and a cavalry regiment from New York. After two hours, one of the detectives decided to light the barn on fire. Soon after, a soldier shot him. He died a few hours later.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Three days later, the government announced that they were going to indict eight people for conspiracy to assassinate the president. Mary Serot was one of them. They would be tried together by a military tribunal.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  And the argument that the government made was that the war wasn't over. Even though Lee had surrendered, there were still fighting going on in Texas and other Western states. And so the government used that as an excuse not to have the trial become a civilian trial, that we were still at war, they said, and so it should be a military trial. Now, military trials are very different than civilian trials. The protections for the defendant are not the same. They're not quite as rarest. And at that time, defendants still had a tough time, whether it was a civilian court or not. But there were protections for civilian defendants. But in a military tribunal, it's the judges and the jury are all the same people.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  The trial was held at Fort McNair in Washington. In court, Mary wore a black veil over her face.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  And occasionally, she would have to lift the veil so that people could identify her. And so the press really latched on to Mary as this vicious, mean, terrible, evil woman. And there was even a publication that had drawings of all the conspirators. And Mary is at the center of it. It was like an oval with the different images of the co-conspirators, the men. But she was center of this drawing. And it was very surprising because she didn't plan everything. She was not the center of the conspiracy, but the press made it sound like she was.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Mary was seated away from the rest of the male defendants. She didn't say anything during the proceedings. At that time, defendants weren't allowed to testify in their own trials. Sometimes, Mary had to remove her veil so that a witness could identify her. A reporter said that her expression, for the several hours she was under our eyes, was that of a deeply somber gentleness. She is doing her best to make a favorable impression by dress and aspect upon her judges.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  But one newspaper called her a tigress, and another said that there was something repulsive about her. People in the courtroom were heard saying, "She looks like a devil." One woman said, "I hope they'll hang her."

• 34:14Speaker 02

  What is Mary's defense strategy?

• 34:17Speaker 03

  That she didn't know anything. She didn't know that Booth was going to assassinate the president. And Mary was kind of haughty because she expected that her Victorian womanhood and her deep Catholic faith would protect her. That there was no way people would believe that she was involved in a plot to assassinate the president.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Louis Weichman, Mary's boarder and John Serot's friend, was one of the first witnesses called to testify. He described Mary as sweet and caring, and someone he was fond of. He said he didn't understand why she was friends with John Wilkes Booth. He testified that he'd seen several of the arrested conspirators at the boarding house, and that he'd been with Mary when she went to the tavern in the days before the assassination.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Mary's lawyers weren't able to explain what Mary was doing in the week leading up to the assassination. They also said that Mary had bad eyesight. That was why she hadn't recognized Louis Payne, the man who had tried to kill the Secretary of State when he showed up at the boarding house. But Mary's boarders testified that Mary didn't seem to have any problems with recognizing people by the dim gas lamps in the parlor. The prosecution brought several witnesses who remembered how often John Wilkes Booth came to visit Mary, and had seen Mary delivering messages and supplies for Booth. The man who ran the tavern in Maryland for Mary testified

• 35:56Speaker 02

  that she had asked him to get the weapons hidden in the tavern, ready to be picked up.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Anna Serot was called to the stand to testify for her mother's defense. Afterward, she fainted. She attended every day of the trial after that. The newspapers reported that she had had a cheering effect on Mary. Later, Mary's health started to decline, and the court let Anna stay with Mary in her cell during the day. In their closing arguments, Mary's lawyers called Mary "widowed of her natural protectors", and that her son John was really the one who had been involved. They also argued that the military trial was unconstitutional.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Two days later, the commission decided that all eight defendants were guilty. Four were sentenced to prison, and the rest were given a death sentence. Mary Serot was one of them. Five of the commissioners from the trial wrote in their decision that they thought Mary's sentence should be commuted to life in prison because of her sex and age. She was 42. Their recommendation went to President Andrew Johnson, who had the final say in approving the sentences. On July 5, Andrew Johnson approved the execution of Mary Serot.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  He said that Mary's "sex" did not make her any the less guilty, and that she "kept the nest that hatched the egg." The execution was scheduled for two days later. Do you think Mary ever thought that she would get a death sentence?

• 37:45Speaker 03

  I think Mary never thought in a million years that she would get a death sentence. I think she thought she might get a couple of years in prison, and that's it.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Mary's lawyers said, "So sudden was the shock, so unexpected the result, we hardly knew how to proceed." They went to the White House to try to speak with President Johnson. He wouldn't see them. They brought Anna Serot to see one of the president's military advisers, to see if he would talk to the president. Later that morning, he told them he had tried, but the president would not change his mind. He said, "I can do nothing."

• 38:27Speaker 02

  On July 7th, thousands of people came to Washington for the execution. Mary was being hanged with three other men. When the executioner put the noose around Mary's neck, some people in the crowd got upset. It was the first time a woman had been executed by the federal government.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Oddly, as soon as the hanging happened, within a couple of days, the public sort of soured on the idea. And I think it's sort of like trauma from the Civil War to begin with. They were just tired of all of this and they wanted to move on as a country and to put everything behind them. And everyone was uncomfortable with the hanging of a woman, particularly because there were photographs available of the hanging. And for the people who saw them, it was shocking.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  People began to say that Louis Wykman had lied on the stand, that he was actually part of the assassination conspiracy. Two weeks after her execution, one newspaper reported, "The conviction is strengthening that Mrs. Mary Isarott was innocent of any complicity in the murder of Mr. Lincoln. Everything in her personal character repels the idea that she could have lent her aid to the atrocious deed." President Johnson was later criticized for signing off on Mary's death sentence.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  There was so much drama, I think that the newspapers loved printing it all. And so they just kept feeding into this idea that the government had hanged this innocent woman. And the images are just so appalling that people, you know, bought into it.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Mary's son, John Sarott Jr., had been in hiding in Canada during his mother's trial. After her execution, he went to Europe.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  He goes to France and then Italy. He joins the papal guards. He's traveling through Europe, trying to escape federal detectives that are, they're getting clues from different people that he's in England. Then he's in Paris, he's in France and Italy. And then he goes to Egypt. And eventually, he does get captured and brought back to the United States in 1867.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  John Serat Jr. was tried for treason, but his case ended in a mistrial. In 1868, the charges were dropped. He began touring the country, giving lectures about his mother's innocence.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  And those who supported Mary, I mean, they kept campaigning for 40 years, until they ended up all dying of old age, et cetera, to convince the world that she was innocent and to have her pardoned posthumously, which she never was. And some of them had the evidence, but they just would not accept that Mary, as a woman, was involved.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Historians have debated about what Mary Serat did or did not do for over 100 years. Kate Clifford Larson says she's looked at the documents from the trial and at interviews from witnesses and the conspirators.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  There's no way that a person can come away thinking she was not informed, that she was not a co-conspirator, that she, you know, that she couldn't have helped John Wilkes Booth.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  After Mary's execution, The New York Times wrote that she had "paid the penalty of her crime." And the wisest thing is to let her name be as far forgotten as the magnitude of that crime will allow.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  I think, you know, when it comes to the story of Lincoln and Booth, it's such a neat story. This handsome, wonderful actor loses his mind over losing to the Union, and he kills Lincoln, and that's it. It's kind of a complicated story when you realize how many Confederate spies there were and how many co-conspirators were there and how many people hated Abraham Lincoln, who becomes this martyr figure for all of us. And then to have a woman be part of it? It's such a complicated story. But I think everyone should know about Mary Serat.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajikko, Lily Clark, Lena Silhison, and Megan Kinnane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spoor, talking about

• 43:52Speaker 02

  everything from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at This is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at criminal_podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 44:41Speaker 05

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