Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

Booth asks Jones to bring him newspapers so he can see the public’s response to the assassination. Jones agrees to do so and leaves. He begins his preparations for Booth’s escape. Because of all the Union cavalrymen, Jones makes a show of following his usual routine to avoid suspicion while sending his Black manservant out in a secret boat to start making fishing trips from Pope’s Creek to Dent’s Meadow. If the servant is seen there regularly, no one will notice when in a few days they land the boat at Dent’s Meadow to ferry Booth over the river into Virginia.

On Easter Sunday, Atzerodt arrives at Hezekiah Metz’s house in Montgomery County, Maryland. He mentions that if Grant was killed, it would have been by someone following him onto a train (revealing he knows details of the assassination plots). That afternoon, he goes to his cousin Hartman Richter’s house nearby. Dr. Samuel Mudd is worried that he will be linked to the conspiracy because he had frequently been seen in public with Booth previously. To throw off suspicion, he tells his cousin, George Mudd, a Union sympathizer, to pass on to the cavalrymen in Bryantown that two strangers had arrived at his farm on Friday night.