27. John Frederick Parker abandoned his post and went unpunished
John Parker was a Metropolitan Police officer with a severely checkered past, having been reprimanded multiple times for being drunk on duty and other indiscretions, including visiting a brothel while on duty. Yet he was still assigned as one of the bodyguards for President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Assigned to stand guard outside the entrance to Lincoln’s box, where he would have encountered John Wilkes Booth, Parker instead left the theater with some of its employees to drink at a saloon next door. He was not disciplined for the event, and was later assigned as Mrs. Lincoln’s bodyguard before she moved out of the White House.
