Dead Wrong

About the Book

April 14, 1865. Fearing an assassination attempt, and sensitive to his poor health, the president’s security officer sends an impersonator to accompany Mary Todd Lincoln to a performance of Our American Cousin playing that evening at Ford’s Theatre. It is not the first time an impersonator is used as a stand-in for the failing Abraham Lincoln. At approximately 10:13 p.m., a shot is fired in the presidential box. A man screams, “sic semper tyrannis,” and leaps to the floor. Twelve days later, a southern extremist, alleged to be John Wilkes Booth, the president’s assassin, is cornered and killed at Garrett’s farm in Virginia. Three eyewitnesses claim the body is Booth’s. Three others swear it is not. A fourth identifies it as that of James William Boyd who, except for hair color, is the spitting image of the murderer. Both have the initials, JWB. Federal authorities prohibit photographers from taking pictures of the corpse. The body, officially declared to be Booth’s, is hastily buried. Four years pass. Booth, under the alias John St. Helen, has artfully avoided discovery and continues the family tradition as an actor on the London stage. Learning that he has assassinated an impostor, and that the president still lives, he immediately sails for America, determined to finish what he started. Near the end of his life, Abraham Lincoln suffered from a disease that has since been identified as Marfan Syndrome. This degenerative tissue and skeletal disease causes disfigurement of the extremities–arms, legs and cranium–eventually disabling the victim. This, and the constant threat of assassination, required the creative use of impersonators for some of the president’s non-speaking public appearances. Such was the case on the night of April 14th, 1865. Dead Wrong chronicles two men’s search for the truth about the Lincoln assassination–a search separated by 135 years. Dr. Martin Rudd, a forensic scientist at Bethesda Naval Hospital, discovers the first section of his great-great-great grandfather’s diary in the basement of their family estate in Saratoga, NY. Malachi Rudd–“crazy Malachi”–the diary’s author, claimed that, while he was a Pinkerton agent in Washington during the late 1860s, he learned the truth about the assassination fraud and the ensuing kidnapping. Malachi also discovers that Booth is alive, has returned to the U.S., and is bent on revenge. He initiates a life-and-death struggle to find the president before Booth does. Is Malachi telling the truth? Secretly, Dr. Rudd performs the DNA testing and confirms his ancestor’s preposterous tale. The man assassinated in Ford’s Theatre was not Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Rudd becomes obsessed with the unanswered questions. What happened to Lincoln? Did Booth succeed in his second attempt at assassination or did Malachi foil the plot? And finally, what became of Malachi? The answers are in the lost, second part of Malachi’s diary. Dr. Rudd must find it and then confront the moral and political dilemma of whether to go public with his discovery. Dead Wrong compels the reader to experience the convulsive forces that produced a great humanitarian like Lincoln and a cold-blooded assassin like Booth. The story unfolds through excerpts from Malachi Rudd’s diary and a narrative that relates the concurrent movements of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln, and Lincoln’s tormented, guilt-ridden abductors. Dr. Martin Rudd is the vehicle for relating the contemporary part of the novel. From Charleston, SC, through upstate New York and the Sacandaga River Valley, to the Canadian border, the plot propels the reader to a dramatic climax on April 14th, 1870, between Lincoln, Booth and Malachi Rudd in the desolation of the St. Lawrence River Valley.

About the Author

Bill Dantini has been a professional writer for more than twenty-five years. He is the cofounder and chairman of BtB Marketing Communications, a Raleigh, NC, advertising agency, and a former marketing executive for General Electric. A native of Amsterdam, NY, he graduated from St. Lawrence University with a degree in English, and holds a Masters degree from the University of Louisville. An avid Lincoln and Civil War buff, Mr. Dantini brewed the plot of Dead Wrong since his college days. While he doesn’t consider himself a history revisionist, he likes to put “what-if” spins on historical events. Dead Wrong is his first novel. Mr. Dantini lives with his wife and three children in Raleigh, NC.