The courthouse where Ernest Burkhart was tried still looms over Pawhuska. Credit 69
The auditorium was crowded, and I found my seat as the lights dimmed and the film began. An opening statement read, “In early missionary journals Osages were often described as being ‘the happiest people in the world.’…They had a sense of freedom because they didn’t own anything and nothing owned them. But the Osage Nation was in the way of the economic drive of the European world…and life as they once knew it would never be the same.” The statement continued, “Today our hearts are divided between two worlds. We are strong and courageous, learning to walk in these two worlds, hanging on to the threads of our culture and traditions as we live in a predominantly non-Indian society. Our history, our culture, our heart, and our home will always be stretching our legs across the plains, singing songs in the morning light, and placing our feet down with the ever beating heart of the drum. We walk in two worlds.”
The ballet powerfully evoked these two colliding worlds. It showed the Osage from the time they roamed the plains to their first encounter with European explorers and missionaries, and to the black-gold rush. At one point, the dancers appeared dressed as flappers, twirling wildly to jazzy music. Suddenly, they were interrupted by the sounds of an explosion. The music and the dancing became mournful as a succession of funereal dances conveyed the murderous Reign of Terror. One of the mourners, representing Hale, wore a mask to hide his face of evil.
A subsequent scene depicted the Osage’s contributions to U.S. military efforts: Clarence Leonard Tinker, a member of the tribe, was the first Native American to reach the rank of major general and died when his plane was lost during World War II. To my surprise, a familiar figure appeared on-screen. It was Margie Burkhart, who had a brief, non-dancing role in the ballet, as the mother of one of the departing soldiers. She moved gracefully across the stage, wearing a shawl around her shoulders, echoing the way Mollie used to wear her Indian blanket.
At the conclusion of the show, many people in the audience lingered. I didn’t see Margie in attendance, but she later told me that when she first saw the ballet’s depiction of the Reign of Terror, “it hit me in the stomach.” She added, “I didn’t think it would affect me like that, but it did. There was so much emotion.” Now, in the audience, I encountered the museum director Kathryn Red Corn. She asked me how my research was going. When I mentioned the likely involvement of H. G. Burt—someone who had never been publicly linked to the killings—she showed little surprise and told me to come see her at the museum the following morning.
When I arrived, I found her sitting at her desk in her office, surrounded by artifacts. “Look at this,” she said, handing me a copy of a brittle old letter. It was written in neat script and was dated November 27, 1931. “Look at the signature on the bottom,” Red Corn said. The name was “W. K. Hale.”
She explained that Hale had sent the letter from prison to a member of the tribe and that not long ago a descendant had donated it to the museum. As I read through the letter, I was struck by the buoyant tone. Hale wrote, “I am in perfect health. I weigh 185 lbs. I haven’t got a grey hair.” When he got out of jail, he said, he hoped to return to the reservation: “I had rather live at Gray Horse than any place on earth.” And he insisted, “I will always be the Osages true Friend.”
Red Corn shook her head. “Can you believe it?” she said.
I assumed that she had invited me to the museum in order to show me the letter, but I soon discovered that she had another reason. “I thought this might be a good time to tell you that story I mentioned before, about my grandfather,” she said. She explained that after her grandfather divorced her grandmother, he wed a white woman, and in 1931 he began to suspect that he was being poisoned—by his second wife. When relatives visited her grandfather’s home, Red Corn recalled, he was scared. He would tell them, “Don’t eat or drink anything in this house.” Not long after, Red Corn’s grandfather dropped dead; he was forty-six years old. “Up until then he’d been in good health,” Red Corn said. “There was nothing wrong with him. His wife made off with a lot of the money.” The family was convinced that he had been poisoned, but there was never an investigation: “Back then, everyone covered these things up. The undertakers. The doctors. The police.”
Red Corn did not know more than these fragmentary details relayed to her by relatives, and she hoped that I could investigate her grandfather’s death. After a long pause, she said, “There were a lot more murders during the Reign of Terror than people know about. A lot more.”
During my years researching the murders of the Osage, I had turned my small office in New York into a grim repository. The floor and shelves were stacked with thousands of pages of FBI documents, autopsy reports, wills and last testaments, crime scene photographs, trial transcripts, analyses of forged documents, fingerprints, studies on ballistics and explosives, bank records, eyewitness statements, confessions, intercepted jailhouse notes, grand jury testimony, logs from private investigators, and mug shots. Whenever I obtained a new document, such as a copy of the Hale letter that Red Corn had shown me, I would label it and place it amid the stacks (my pitiful version of a Hoover filing system). Despite the darkness of the material, each new discovery gave me some hope that I might be able to fill in gaps in the historical chronicles—those spaces where there seemed to exist no recorded witnesses or voices, only the silence of the grave.
Crime scene photograph of Blackie Thompson, who was gunned down in 1934 after he escaped from prison Credit 70
The case of Red Corn’s grandfather was one of those voids. Because there had been no investigation into the death, and because all the principal figures were deceased, I couldn’t find any trail of evidence to follow. Virtually all traces of the grandfather’s life and death—of passions and turmoil and possible brutal violence—had seemingly been washed away.
The conversation with Red Corn, though, prompted me to probe more deeply into perhaps the most puzzling of the Osage murder cases—that of Charles Whitehorn. The murder, which bore all the markings of a Hale-orchestrated hit, took place in May 1921—the same time period as the slaying of Anna Brown, in what was considered the beginning of the four-year Reign of Terror. Yet no evidence had ever surfaced implicating Hale or his henchmen in Whitehorn’s murder.
Though the case had never been solved, it had originally been a prime focus of investigators, and when I returned to New York, I gathered evidentiary material related to the crime. In one of the tottering piles in my office, I found the logs from the private detectives hired by Whitehorn’s estate after his death. Their reports read as though they’d been torn from a dime-store novel, with lines such as “This dope is coming to me from a reliable source.”
As I read through the reports, I jotted down key details:
Whitehorn last seen alive in Pawhuska on May 14, 1921. Witness spotted him around 8:00 p.m. outside Constantine Theater.
Body discovered two weeks later—on a hill about a mile from downtown Pawhuska.
According to undertaker, “The position of the body indicated that he had fallen in that position and had not been carried there.”
Weapon: a .32 revolver. Shot—twice—between the eyes. A professional hit?
The reports noted that the attorney Vaughan had been eager to help the private eyes. “Vaughan who is well acquainted with the Indians stated that his real interest in the case was to…have the guilty party prosecuted,” a private detective wrote. Neither the private detectives nor Vaughan had any inkling that Vaughan would eventually become a target—that within two years he, too, would be murdered—and I found myself pleading with them to see what they could not see.
Comstock—the attorney and guardian who, despite Hoover’s initial suspicions, had proven to be trustworthy—had also tried to assist the private detectives investigating the murders. “Mr. Comstock had received some information,” a private detective wrote, noting that Comstock had reported that on May 14 an unidenti
fied man had been seen lurking on the hill where Whitehorn’s body was subsequently found.
Because the Whitehorn case was officially unresolved, I expected the trails of evidence to disappear into a morass. In fact, the reports were bracing in their clarity. Based on leads from informants and from circumstantial evidence, the private detectives began to develop a crystalline theory of the crime. After Whitehorn’s death, his part-white, part-Cheyenne widow, Hattie, had married an unscrupulous white man named LeRoy Smitherman. The private eyes learned that the marriage had been orchestrated by Minnie Savage—a “shrewd, immoral, capable woman,” as one investigator put it, who ran a boardinghouse in Pawhuska. The private eyes suspected that she and Smitherman, as well as other conspirators, had arranged Whitehorn’s killing in order to steal his headright and fortune. Over time, many of the investigators came to believe that Hattie Whitehorn, who had quickly spent some of her husband’s fortune after his death, was also complicit. An informant told a private eye that there was no doubt Hattie Whitehorn was a “prime mover in killing Charley Whitehorn.”
An undercover private eye was placed in Savage’s boardinghouse. “He could hear what was said over the telephone,” another detective wrote in his report, adding that the undercover “man will make good I think but will need some coaching.” Meanwhile, Minnie Savage’s sister became a rich source of information for investigators. She divulged that she had seen what was likely the murder weapon: “Minnie was making up the bed and the gun was under the pillow and Minnie picked it up….It was a rather large gun, dark color.” Despite all this, the private detectives somehow failed to secure enough evidence to prosecute any of the suspects, or perhaps the private eyes were bought off.
When the first federal agents from the Bureau of Investigation began to probe the case, in 1923, they also concluded that Savage, Smitherman, and Hattie Whitehorn were responsible for the murder. “From the evidence thus far gathered,” an agent wrote, it appeared that “Hattie Whitehorn caused him to be murdered in order that she might get hold of his estate.” Hattie denied any involvement in the crime but told one agent, “I am as smart as you are. I have been warned about you.” She added, “You are just getting into my confidence, and if I tell you you will send me to the electric chair.”
By that point, there had been several disturbing twists in the case. Hattie’s new husband, Smitherman, had fled the country for Mexico, taking with him her car and a chunk of her money. Then a man named J. J. Faulkner—whom an agent called an “unprincipled, hypocritical crook”—insinuated himself into Hattie’s life, evidently blackmailing her with information that she’d shared with him about her role in the murder. (One of Hattie’s sisters was heard yelling at Faulkner that he was an SOB and should stop extorting Hattie; Faulkner snapped back that he knew all about Hattie and the murder, and they’d better be careful about how they spoke to him.) In a report, Agent Burger and a colleague stated, “We are strongly of the belief that Faulkner has succeeded in obtaining some sort of confession from Hattie, and is using it to make her do as he sees fit, by threatening her with prosecution and exposing her, and that his object is to gain control of her…property at her death, and get money from her while she lives.”
Before long, Hattie became incurably sick. Agents noted that she seemed “liable to die at any time.” Remarkably, none of the agents expressed suspicions over the nature of her illness, even though so many victims during the Reign of Terror had been poisoned. Faulkner had a wife, and she told agents that he was “refusing to allow Hattie to be sent to a hospital…in order to keep her under his influence.” According to Hattie’s sisters, Faulkner had begun to steal money from her while she was “under the influence of a narcotic.”
The sisters eventually managed to admit Hattie to a hospital. Agents, believing that she was about to die, tried to persuade her to give a confession. In a report, agents wrote that she had admitted to Comstock that “she does know the facts and has never told what she knows” and that “they”—presumably Minnie Savage and other conspirators—had sent Hattie away at the time Whitehorn was murdered. But Hattie never disclosed anything further. Not surprisingly, she recovered from her mysterious illness after being dislodged from Faulkner’s grip.
By the time Tom White showed up to begin his investigation, in 1925, the bureau had all but dropped the Whitehorn case. Agent Burger wrote dismissively that it was an “isolated murder,” unconnected to the systematic killings. The case did not fit into the bureau’s dramatic theory of the murders: that a lone mastermind was responsible for all the killings, and that when Hale and his henchmen were captured, the case of the Osage murders was solved. Yet, in hindsight, the fact that Hale appeared to have played no role in the Whitehorn plot was the very reason the killing was so important. Like the suspicious death of Red Corn’s grandfather, the plot against Whitehorn—and the failed plot against his widow—exposed the secret history of the Reign of Terror: the evil of Hale was not an anomaly.
25 THE LOST MANUSCRIPT
You must go out there and see what is happening,” Kathryn Red Corn told me when I visited the Osage Nation again, in June 2015. And so following her directions, I drove through Pawhuska and headed west across the prairie, through the tall grasses, until I saw what she’d vividly described to me: scores of metallic towers invading the sky. Each one stood 420 feet tall, the equivalent of a thirty-story skyscraper, and had three whirring blades. A single blade was as long as the wings of an airliner. The towers were part of a windmill farm, which spanned more than eight thousand acres and was expected to eventually supply electricity to some forty-five thousand homes in Oklahoma.
More than a hundred years after oil was discovered in Osage territory, a new revolutionary source of energy was transforming the region. But this time the Osage viewed it as a threat to their underground reservation. “Did you see them?” Red Corn said of the turbines, when I returned. “This company came in here and put them up without our permission.” The federal government, representing the Osage Nation, had filed a lawsuit against Enel, the Italian energy conglomerate that owned the wind farm. Citing the terms of the 1906 Allotment Act, the suit alleged that because the company had excavated limestone and other minerals while building the foundations for the turbines, it needed the Osage’s approval to continue operations. Otherwise, Enel was violating the Osage’s sovereignty over their underground reservation. The company insisted that it wasn’t in the mining business, and thus did not need a lease from the Osage. “We don’t disturb the mineral estate,” a representative of the project told the press.
On July 10, 2015, at dawn, a chief and two dozen members of the Osage Nation gathered beneath the windmills for a prayer to Wah’Kon-Tah. As the first sunlight burned through the thin, blue mist and radiated off the blades, a prayer leader said that the Osage were a “humble people, asking for your help.”
Not long after, a court sided with Enel, saying that though the government’s interpretation of the Allotment Act would no doubt benefit the Osage, the “defendants have not marketed or sold minerals or otherwise engaged in mineral development. As a result, they are not required to obtain a lease.” Plans were already under way for a second wind farm in the county.
The new windmill farm built above the Osage’s underground reservation Credit 71
New government environmental regulations for oil drilling were having an even more profound effect on the Osage’s underground reservation. The regulations, issued in 2014, were costly to satisfy, and as a consequence oilmen had virtually stopped drilling new wells, given that they produced only marginal returns. An oil producer told a reporter, “For the first time in a hundred years, there’s no drilling in Osage County.”
I continued researching the murders, but there were fewer archives to examine, fewer documents to find. Then one day at the public library in Pawhuska I noticed, tucked amid volumes of Osage history, a spiral-bound manuscript titled “The Murder of Mary DeNoya-Bellieu-Lewis.” It appeared to have been
assembled by hand, its pages printed on a computer. According to an introductory note, dated January 1998, the manuscript was compiled by Anna Marie Jefferson, the great-great-grandniece of Mary Lewis. “My great-grandmother…first told me the story about Mary,” Jefferson wrote. “I first heard about this around 1975.” Jefferson began to gather, from relatives and newspaper clippings and other records, bits of information about the murder—an endeavor that spanned two decades. She must have left a copy of the manuscript with the library, determined that the story not fall into the chasm of history.
I sat down and began to read. Mary Lewis, who was born in 1861, was an allotted member of the tribe. “With this money she was able to enjoy a prosperous life,” Jefferson wrote. Lewis had two marriages that ended in divorce, and in 1918, in her mid-fifties, she was raising a ten-year-old adopted child. That summer, Lewis took her daughter on a trip to Liberty, Texas, a small city about forty miles from Houston, on the banks of the Trinity River. Lewis was accompanied by two white men: Thomas Middleton, who was a friend, and a companion of his. With Lewis’s money, they bought a houseboat and stayed on the river. Then, on August 18, Lewis vanished. After authorities failed to investigate—“They never would have done anything,” one of Lewis’s relatives said—her family hired a private detective. He discovered that after Lewis’s disappearance Middleton had pretended to be her adopted son in order to cash several of her checks. In January 1919, after the police detained Middleton and his companion, the private detective interrogated them. He told Middleton that he would “one hundred times rather find the old lady alive than dead,” adding, “If you can give any information to locate her, that will help you.”