Lincoln Assassination Conspirator. Although convicted by court, his role was not clear, although it may have been to kill Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he grew up on the same street as his childhood friend, John Wilkes Booth. Before the Civil War, he worked as a manufacturer of ornamental plaster. When the Civil War broke out, he hurried south to join the Confederate Army, and served until June 1862. After his discharge, he returned to Baltimore to work as a clerk in a family feed business. In the late summer of 1864, Booth recruited O'Laughlen in his plan to kidnap Lincoln, to hold Lincoln for exchange of Confederate prisoners. O'Laughlen attended the March 15, 1865 meeting at Gautier's Restaurant in Washington DC, in which the conspirators finalized their plan to kidnap Lincoln, but when Lincoln suddenly changed his plans, the kidnap plot fell through. O'Laughlen would claim that he dropped out of the plot at the end of March, before the plot changed to kill Lincoln and his key cabinet members, but in mid-April he came to Washington DC, arriving the day before the assassination. O'Laughlen took a room at the National Hotel, where Booth also stayed. On the night of April 13, O'Laughlen visited the home of Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, but was asked to leave, since Stanton was not seeing visitors that evening. On the morning of April 15, O'Laughlen returned to Baltimore. Arrested on April 17, O'Laughlen was charged with being an accomplice to Booth. He was found guilty of conspiracy, and was sentenced to life in prison. Three other conspirators, Dr. Samuel Mudd, Samuel Arnold, and Edman Spangler were also given life, and all four were sent to Fort Jefferson, Florida, in the Dry Tortugas, to serve out their sentences. In September 1867, Yellow Fever broke out at the prison, and O'Laughlen died of it on September 23, 1867. On February 13, 1869, President Andrew Johnson issued an order that O'Laughlen's body was to be turned over to his mother, and the body was shipped to Baltimore, where it was interned at Greenmount Cemetery.