by David Grann
It seemed as if the agents had once more been duped. But they continued to work on Pike, to pressure him, and over time he began to reveal, little by little, a hidden dimension to the case. He disclosed that he’d never really been hired to solve the murder of Anna Brown; in fact, he’d been asked to conceal Bryan’s whereabouts on the night of the crime.
Pike told agents that he was supposed to manufacture evidence and to generate false witnesses—to “shape an alibi,” as he put it. What’s more, he claimed that his orders had come directly from William Hale.
Pike explained that Hale took pains never to say explicitly that Bryan had been involved in Anna’s murder, but this was evident from what Hale was asking him to do. If Pike was telling the truth, it meant that Hale—a seeming paragon of law and order who had held himself up as Mollie Burkhart’s most staunch protector—had been lying all these years about Anna’s murder. Pike could not answer what White wanted to know most: Was Hale merely protecting Bryan, or was he part of a more intricate, nefarious design?
Pike, though, told agents one more thing that was startling. When he met with Hale and Bryan, Pike said, there was sometimes another person present: Ernest Burkhart. Pike added that Ernest was careful never to “discuss this case or talk it over with him in the presence of Mollie Burkhart.”
13 A HANGMAN’S SON
The first time that Tom White saw a criminal hanged he was just a boy, and the executioner was his father. In 1888, his father, Robert Emmett White, was elected sheriff of Travis County, Texas, which included Austin, then a city of fewer than fifteen thousand people. A towering man with a dense mustache, Emmett, as Tom’s father liked to be called, was poor, stern, hardworking, and pious. In 1870, at the age of eighteen, he migrated from Tennessee to the still-wild frontier of central Texas. Four years later, he married Tom’s mother, Maggie. They lived in a log cabin, in the desolate hill country outside Austin, where they herded cattle and scratched the earth for whatever food it might yield. Tom, who was born in 1881, was the third of their five children; among them was Doc, the youngest, and Dudley, Tom’s bruising older brother with whom he was particularly close. The nearest schoolhouse—which had one room and a single teacher for eight grades—was three miles away, and to get there, Tom and his siblings had to walk.
When Tom was six, his mother died, apparently from complications after childbirth. Her body was laid in a plot where Tom could see the grass growing over her. Emmett was left to raise Tom and his siblings, all of whom were under the age of ten. A nineteenth-century book profiling distinguished Texans said of Emmett, “Mr. White belongs to that class of solid, substantial farmers of which Travis county can boast….He is well known in the county, and the people have the greatest confidence in his energy and integrity of character.” In 1888, a delegation of townsfolk beseeched Emmett to run for county sheriff, which he did, winning easily. And so Tom’s father became the law.
Tom (standing to the left) and his brothers, including Doc (on the donkey) and Dudley (far right) Credit 41
As sheriff, Emmett was in charge of the county jail, in Austin, and he moved with his children into a house adjoining the building. The jail resembled a fortress, with barred windows and cold stone passageways and tiered cells. In Emmett’s first year, the jail held nearly three hundred prisoners, including four murderers, sixty-five thieves, two arsonists, twenty-four burglars, two forgers, five rapists, and twenty-four inmates classified as lunatics. Tom later recalled, “I was raised practically right in the jail. I could look down from my bedroom window and see the jail corridor and the doors to some of the cells.”
It was as if the Scripture were unfolding before his eyes: good and evil, redemption and damnation. One time, a melee broke out in the prison. As Sheriff White tried to quell the riot, his children ran to the nearby courthouse, calling for help. The Austin Weekly Statesman published a story about the incident under the headline BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD; THE COUNTY JAIL TURNED INTO A VERITABLE SLAUGHTER PEN. The reporter described the scene that young Tom had encountered: “The writer has seen many bloody and sickening sights in his experience in newspaper work, but none of them approached the disgusting sight that met his gaze when he entered the county jail yesterday afternoon about half past five o’clock. Turn which way he might nothing was to be seen but blood.”
After the incident, in which five men were badly injured, Emmett White became a firm, even unyielding, sheriff. Still, he showed remarkable consideration toward the people in his custody and insisted on making arrests without brandishing his six-shooter. He did not philosophize about the law or his responsibilities, but Tom noticed that he always maintained the same manner, no matter whether the prisoners were black or white or Mexican. At the time, extrajudicial lynchings, particularly of blacks in the South, were one of the most egregious failures of the American legal system. Whenever Emmett heard that locals were planning to throw a “necktie party,” he would rush out to try to stop it. “If a mob attempts to take the negro” from the sheriff, a reporter noted in one case, “there will be trouble.” Emmett refused to put young, nonviolent prisoners in the jail alongside older, more dangerous convicts, and because there was no other place for them, he let them stay in his own house, living with his children. One girl remained with them for weeks on end. Tom never knew why she was in jail, and his father never discussed it.
Tom often puzzled over why criminals did what they did. Some of the prison’s inmates seemed bad through and through, the devil born in them. Some seemed sick in the head, seeing things that other people couldn’t see. Many of the prisoners, though, had been driven to a desperate act—often, something violent and despicable—and afterward they were penitent, seeking redemption. In some ways, these convicts were the most frightening to contemplate, for they demonstrated that badness could take hold of anyone. Tom attended a local Baptist church with his family, and the preacher said that everyone was a sinner—even Emmett, the upholder of justice. These were mysteries that Tom might never solve, though he seemed to spend most of his life trying.
Tom watched his father work. At all hours of the day, including on the Sabbath, Emmett would be summoned to hunt men. Criminology was still primitive: Emmett grabbed his gun, canvassed any witnesses to the crime, then mounted his horse and went in pursuit. He also kept a pack of bloodhounds, which he sometimes deployed in the chase.
Tom’s father oversaw the county jail, in Austin. Credit 42
One summer day in 1892, when Tom was eleven, his father hurried out with the bloodhounds: a family man had been gunned down while riding his horse. Tom’s father noticed that, thirty paces from where the victim lay, there was a spot of trampled earth and a burned ammunition wad; it was the place where the killer had stood. White unleashed the hounds and they picked up the killer’s trail, which curiously led right back to the dead man’s house. As Sheriff White gathered evidence from witnesses, he learned that the victim’s slayer was his own son.
A few weeks later, Tom’s father was summoned again, this time in pursuit of a rapist. A headline in the Statesman read “RAVISHED IN BROAD DAY…Mrs. D. C. Evans Dragged from Her Buggy, Brutally Assaulted and Then Outraged—the Officers Hot on the Trail of the Brutal Wretch.” Despite a grueling chase, the rapist eluded capture. In such cases, Tom’s father withdrew into himself, as if tormented by some dreadful sickness. Once, before he apprehended a fugitive, a reporter observed, “Truth to tell, Sheriff White’s every thought day and night” was of the man, so much so that “his capture soon became a part of Sheriff White’s very existence.”
Every time the sheriff headed out into the dark, the bloodhounds howling, Tom had to live with the terrible uncertainty that his father might never return—that, like Tom’s mother, he might disappear from this world forever. Though it took enormous courage and virtue to risk your life in order to protect society, such selflessness also contained, at least from the vantage point of your loved ones, a hint of cruelty.
Once, a desperado put a gun to E
mmett’s head; somehow, he managed to wrestle the weapon free. Another time, at the jail, a prisoner pulled a knife and stabbed his father from behind. Tom could see the knife protruding from his father’s back, blood gushing onto the floor. It was amazing how much blood was inside a man, inside his father. The prisoner tried to twist the knife, and his father seemed ready to give up the ghost, when suddenly he drove his finger into the prisoner’s eye, causing the eye to pop out—Tom could see it dangling from the socket. His father subdued the prisoner. But Tom would relive that scene all his life. How could one forgive a sinner who tried to kill one’s own father?
The first hanging that Tom witnessed was carried out in January 1894. A nineteen-year-old black man, Ed Nichols, had been convicted of raping a girl and sentenced to be “hung by the neck until he is dead.” The duty of performing an execution, which hadn’t occurred in the county for a decade, fell to the sheriff.
Tom’s father hired a carpenter to construct the gallows near the southern wall of the prison, the only place where the ceiling was sufficiently high. The location was ten feet from Nichols’s cell, and the condemned man—who maintained his innocence and still hoped for a reprieve from the governor—could hear the planks being sawed and nailed, sawed and nailed, the pace quickening. Tom’s father was determined to make the killing mercifully swift, and once the apparatus was completed, he repeatedly tested it with sacks of sand.
The governor rejected Nichols’s final appeal, saying, “Let the law take its course.” Tom’s father broke the news to Nichols, who was in his cell, deep in prayer. Nichols tried to stay calm, but his hands began to tremble. He said that he’d like to be clean-shaven and wear a fine black suit for his appointment with death, and Tom’s father promised to honor his wishes.
On the day of the execution, Tom, who was twelve years old, stood on a tier inside the jail. No one shooed him away, not even his father, and he could see Nichols, who was dressed in his new suit, being led by Tom’s father to the scaffolding, time measured in each step and breath. As Tom listened, a preacher read Nichols’s final statement: “Sheriff White has been very accommodating to me indeed. I feel prepared to meet death. My soul is at peace with all mankind.” Then the preacher offered his own holy words. “Ed Nichols is to swing into eternity,” he said. “Sheriff Death is on his black steed, is but a short distance away, coming to arrest the soul of this man to meet the trial at the higher bar where God himself is supreme ruler, Jesus, his son the attorney, and the Holy Ghost the prosecutor.”
When the preacher finished, Tom heard a familiar voice. It was his father, reading the death warrant. The noose was fitted around Nichols’s neck, and a black hood placed over his head. Tom could no longer see Nichols’s face, but he could see his father holding the lever for the trapdoor. At two minutes before four in the afternoon, his father sprang the trap. The body fell before jerking violently upward. Then a sound of astonishment and horror rippled through the crowd. Despite all the meticulous construction, Nichols was still moving, still trembling with life. “He kicked and jerked around a long time,” Tom later recalled. “It seemed like he would never give up and die.” Finally, his body stopped moving and was cut down from the rope.
Perhaps because he witnessed this—and other executions—or perhaps because he had seen the effect of the ordeal on his father, or perhaps because he feared that the system could doom an innocent man, Tom grew to oppose what was then sometimes called “judicial homicide.” And he came to see the law as a struggle to subdue the violent passions not only in others but also in oneself.
In 1905, when Tom was twenty-four, he enlisted in the Texas Rangers. Created in the nineteenth century as a volunteer citizen militia to fight American Indians on the frontier and, later, Mexicans along the border, the Rangers had evolved into a kind of state police force. American Indians and Mexicans had long despised the Rangers for their brutal, shoot-first methods. But among white Texans they were widely mythologized. As Lyndon B. Johnson later put it, “Every school boy in Texas cuts his eye teeth on stories about the Texas Rangers. I wasn’t any exception.”
Tom’s brother Dudley, equally entranced by the Ranger mystique, entered the force the same year as Tom, and Doc soon joined them. Later, Tom’s brother Coley followed even more closely in their father’s footsteps, becoming the sheriff of Travis County. Doc recalled the simple advice that his father gave him upon becoming a lawman: “Get all the evidence you can, son. Then put yourself in the criminal’s place. Think it out. Plug up those holes, son.”
Like Doc and Dudley, who were each placed in separate Ranger companies, Tom received a meager salary of $40 per month—“the same as a cowpuncher,” as he put it. Tom joined his company at a campsite sixty-five miles west of Abilene. Another Ranger had once observed upon arriving in camp, “Here was a scene worthy of the pencil. Men in groups with long beards and moustaches, dressed in every variety of garment, with one exception, the slouched hat, the unmistakable uniform of a Texas Ranger, and a belt of pistols around their waists, were occupied drying their blankets, cleaning and fixing their guns, and some employed cooking at different fires, while others were grooming their horses. A rougher looking set we never saw.”
Tom learned to be a lawman by following the example of the most skilled officers. If you observed carefully, and if you weren’t too busy liquoring or whoring (which many of the Rangers were), you could learn how to track a horse through the brush—even if, as Tom once found, the thieves had deceptively turned the horseshoes backward. You picked up little tricks: overturning your boots each morning in case a scorpion or some other critter had crept inside; shaking out your blanket for rattlesnakes before lying down at night. You discovered how to avoid quicksand and how to locate streams in otherwise parched land. You understood that it was better to ride a black horse and dress in black like a personification of evil, so as not to be scoped by a gunman in the night.
Tom soon received the orders for one of his first missions: he was to accompany his captain and his sergeant in pursuit of cow rustlers in Kent County, north of Abilene. At one point, Tom and the sergeant paused at a store to get provisions. They tied up their horses and were heading inside when the sergeant asked Tom where his Winchester rifle was. Tom told him that it was in his scabbard, on his horse. The sergeant, a man of explosive temperament, yelled, “You don’t never do that!…Go get your Winchester right now and bring it in here, and keep it right with you all the time.”
In back row, from left to right, are Tom’s brothers Doc, Dudley, and Coley. In front are Tom’s father, his grandfather, and then Tom. Credit 43
A group of Texas lawmen that includes Tom White (No. 12) and his three brothers, Doc (No. 6), Dudley (No. 7), and Coley (No. 13) Credit 44
Tom, chastened, retrieved his rifle, and it was not long before he understood the sergeant’s urgency: they were being tracked by the rustlers. They had to dodge being shot several times before they finally arrested the gang.
Tom became increasingly adept at dealing with what he called “rascality”: cow rustlers, horse thieves, scalawags, pimps, rumrunners, stagecoach robbers, desperadoes, and other human transgressors. When he was sent with another Ranger, Oscar Roundtree, to clean up the lawless town of Bowie, a pastor wrote to White’s captain, saying that he had witnessed “the lawless element completely driven from our town by the two Rangers you sent here.”
During his time as a Ranger, Tom investigated several murders. Tom’s brother Doc recalled, “We had nothing—not even fingerprints. We had to use mostly witnesses, and they were sometimes hard to come by.” Even more troublesome, some Rangers had no patience for the niceties of the law. One member of Tom’s company would seek out the most ruthless bad man in town and then provoke a fight, so he could kill him. Tom, who believed that a lawman could usually “avoid killing if you didn’t lose your head,” later told a writer that he had heated discussions with this Ranger. It didn’t seem right for any man to play judge, jury, and executioner.
; In 1908, while Tom was stationed in Weatherford, a town east of Abilene, he met a young woman named Bessie Patterson. She was petite, at least beside him, and she had short brown hair and sincere eyes. Tom, who’d spent much of his life in male company, was taken with her. Where he was a man of stillness, she was outspoken and a whirl of motion. She ordered him around in a way that few dared, but he didn’t seem to mind; for once, it was not incumbent upon him to be in command of the world around him or the emotions inside him. His job, however, was ill-suited for marriage. Doc’s captain once said, “An officer who hunts desperate criminals has no business having a wife and family.”
Before long, Tom was tugged away from her. With N. P. Thomas, a Ranger who was one of his closest friends, he was sent to deal with a plague of rascality in Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle. A Ranger reported that the city had some of the hardest crooks around and that the sheriff’s office had provided no assistance in removing them; what’s more, the Ranger noted, “the Sheriff has two sons who live at the whore house.”
Thomas had already had several run-ins with the deputy sheriff, and one January morning in 1909 N. P. Thomas was sitting in the county prosecutor’s office when the deputy leveled his gun and shot him in the face. Thomas fell forward, blood gushing from his mouth. When the medics arrived, he was still breathing, but they couldn’t stop the bleeding and he died in agony.