The woman who helped protect Lincoln from the men who tried to kill him in 1861 Petula Dvorak Because no one suspected that the beguiling woman mingling in Alabama social circles was a private eye hunting a master embezzler. The secessionists flirting and gossiping with the lovely "Mrs. Cherry" at Baltimore galas didn't worry about tipping off the charming Southern belle to their assassination plot. And while a city bristling with weapons, rumors, assassins, spies and officers anxiously waited for the heavily guarded President-elect Abraham Lincoln to pass through Baltimore on the way to his ...