Eleven years after John Wilkes Booth's bullet, a gang of Chicago counterfeiters hatches a plan almost too strange to believe: dig up Abraham Lincoln's corpse from his tomb in Springfield, Illinois, and hold it for ransom. The scheme, led by counterfeiting boss Big Jim Kennally, aims to trade the body for the release of jailed engraver Benjamin Boyd and a hefty payoff. Secret Service agent Patrick Tyrrell, whose agency was created mainly to fight currency fraud, gets wind of the plot and moves to stop it before the grave robbers can finish their work. The film uses period photographs, reenactments, and historian interviews to walk through the botched heist, the scramble to secure Lincoln's remains afterward, and the decades of quiet paranoia that followed, including the eventual decision to bury the president under ten feet of concrete and steel. It is a grave-robbing caper turned true-crime investigation, built around a footnote of Lincoln lore most viewers have never heard.