Killers of the Flower Moon

by David Grann

  “Wouldn’t they like to have a statement from you, even though you merely say ‘I am innocent’?”

  “I’ll try my case in the courts, not in the newspapers. Cold tonight, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. How’s the cattle business this season?”

  “Been fair.”

  “It’s a long trip from Pawhuska, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but we’ve had a car with curtains up.”

  “Now about that statement?”

  Hale declined again and was led away by authorities. If Hale had momentarily been uneasy, he was confident by the time White spoke to him—even cocky, evidently convinced that he remained untouchable. He insisted that White had made a mistake. It was as if White were the one in trouble, not him.

  White suspected that Hale would never admit his sins, certainly not to a lawman and perhaps not even to the God whom he so often invoked. Ernest Burkhart offered the only chance for a confession. “You could look at him and size him up as the weak sister,” White observed. A prosecutor working with White put it more bluntly, “We all picked Ernest Burkhart the one to break.”

  Burkhart was brought into a room on the third floor of a federal building in Guthrie, which was being used as a makeshift interrogation room: the box. He was wearing the same clothes that he had when he was arrested, and White thought that he looked like a “small-town dandy, well dressed in a western way, expensive cowboy boots, loud shirt, flashy tie, and a high-priced, tailored suit.” He moved about nervously and licked his lips.

  White and Agent Frank Smith questioned him. “We want to talk to you about the murder of Bill Smith’s family and Anna Brown,” White said.

  “Hell, I don’t know a thing about it,” Burkhart insisted.

  White explained that they had talked to a man named Burt Lawson in the pen, who said differently—said that Burkhart knew a good deal about the murders. The mention of Lawson did not seem to faze Burkhart, who insisted that he’d never had any dealings with him.

  “He says you were the contact man in setting up the Smith house explosion,” White said.

  “He’s lying,” Burkhart said emphatically. A doubt seized White, a doubt that perhaps had been lurking somewhere inside him but had been suppressed: What if Lawson was lying and had simply picked up information from other outlaws in prison who had heard rumors about the case? Perhaps Lawson was lying in the hopes that prosecutors would reduce his jail time, in exchange for his testimony. Or maybe the whole confession had been orchestrated by Hale—another one of his plots within a plot. White still didn’t know quite what to believe. But if Lawson was lying about anything, getting a confession from Burkhart was even more crucial; otherwise, the case would collapse.

  For hours, in the hot, claustrophobic box, White and Smith went over the circumstantial evidence that they’d gathered on each of the murders, trying to trip up Burkhart. White thought that he detected some element of remorse in him, as if he wanted to unburden himself, to protect his wife and children. Yet, whenever White or Smith mentioned Hale, he stiffened in his chair, more afraid of his uncle, it seemed, than he was of the law.

  “My advice to you is to tell it all,” White said, almost pleadingly.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Burkhart said.

  After midnight, White and Smith gave up and returned Burkhart to his cell. By the next day, White’s case encountered even more trouble. Hale announced that he could prove positively that he had been in Texas at the time of the explosion, for he had received a telegram there and signed for it. If this was true—and White was inclined to believe that it was—then Lawson had indeed been lying all along. In White’s desperation to get Hale, he’d committed the ultimate sin of an evidence man and believed, despite apparent contradictions, what he wanted to believe. White knew that he had only hours before Hale’s lawyers would produce the record of this telegram and spring Hale, along with Burkhart—only hours before word got out that the bureau had humiliated itself, news that would then reach Hoover. As one of Hoover’s aides said of the director, “If he didn’t like you, he destroyed you.” Hale’s lawyers promptly tipped off a reporter who ran a story about Hale’s “perfect” alibi, noting, “He’s not afraid.”

  Desperate, White turned to the man who had embarrassed Hoover and become a pariah in the eyes of investigators: Blackie Thompson, the part-Cherokee outlaw who, during the bureau’s early investigation, had been released from prison as an informant, only to murder a police officer. Since being caught, he’d been locked up at the state penitentiary, a blight on the bureau best unseen.

  Yet, from the bureau’s early reports on the case, White suspected that Blackie might have key information about the murders, and without consulting Hoover, White had him transported to Guthrie. If anything went wrong, if Blackie escaped or hurt a soul, White’s career would be over. And White made sure that Luther Bishop—a state lawman who had gunned down Al Spencer—was in charge of transferring Blackie. When Blackie arrived at the federal building, he was in chains and flanked by a small army. On a nearby rooftop, White had placed a rifleman, who kept Blackie in his scope through a window.

  Blackie was still hostile, sullen, mean, but when White asked him about Hale and Burkhart’s role in the murders of the Osage, his mood seemed to change. A man filled with venom and bigotry, he’d once complained that Hale and Ernest Burkhart were “too much Jew—they want everything for nothing.”

  Agents told Blackie that they couldn’t cut a deal with him to reduce his sentence, and he spoke grudgingly at first about the murders, but gradually he divulged more and more. He said that Burkhart and Hale had once approached him and his old buddy Curley Johnson to kill Bill and Rita Smith. As part of the payment, they had proposed that Blackie steal Burkhart’s car, and one night, while Burkhart was at home in bed with Mollie, Blackie had taken it from their garage. Blackie had later been picked up by the law for car theft and never went through with any of the killings.

   The outlaw Blackie Thompson Credit 54

  It wasn’t clear if Blackie would ever agree to testify in court to these matters, but White hoped that he had enough information to save the case. He left Blackie surrounded by guards and rushed with Agent Smith to interrogate Burkhart again.

  Back in the box, White told Burkhart, “We’re not satisfied with the answers you gave us last night. We believe there’s a good deal you didn’t tell us.”

  “All I know is what’s common talk,” Burkhart said.

  White and Agent Smith played their last card: they told Burkhart that they had another witness who would testify to his involvement in the scheme to kill Bill and Rita Smith. Burkhart, knowing that he had been bluffed once, said that he didn’t believe them.

  “Well, I can go get him if you don’t think we have got him,” Agent Smith said.

  “Bring him in,” Burkhart said.

  White and Smith went and got Blackie and escorted him into the room. While the gunman on the roof kept Blackie in his scope through the window, the outlaw sat across from Burkhart, who looked stunned.

  Agent Smith turned to Blackie and said, “Blackie, have you told me…the truth concerning the propositions made by Ernest Burkhart to you?”

  Blackie replied, “Yes, sir.”

  Agent Smith added, “To kill Bill Smith?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you tell me the truth when you told me Ernest gave you an automobile as part payment of that job?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Blackie, evidently enjoying himself, looked squarely at Burkhart and said, “Ernest, I have told them everything.”

  Burkhart appeared defeated. After Blackie was taken away, White thought that Burkhart was ready to confess and turn on Hale, but each time Burkhart came close to doing so, he stopped himself. Around midnight, White left Burkhart in the custody of the other agents and returned to his hotel room. There were no more tricks to play; exhausted, despairing, he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep.

  Not long after, White w
as jolted awake by the phone. Facing the prospect that something else had gone wrong—that Blackie Thompson had sprung loose—he picked up the receiver and heard the urgent voice of one of his agents. “Burkhart’s ready to tell his story,” he said. “But he won’t give it to us. Says it’s got to be you.”

  When White entered the box, he found Burkhart slumped in his seat, tired and resigned. Burkhart told White that he hadn’t killed all those people, but he knew who had. “I want to tell,” he said.

  White reminded Burkhart of his rights, and Burkhart signed a paper that said, “After being so warned, and with no promises having been made me of immunity from prosecution, and of my own free will and accord, I now make the following statement.”

  Burkhart began speaking about William Hale—about how he had worshipped him as a boy, how he had done all types of jobs for him, and how he had always followed orders. “I relied on Uncle Bill’s judgment,” he said. Hale was a schemer, Burkhart said, and though he hadn’t been privy to all the mechanics of Hale’s plots, his uncle had shared with him details of a murderous plan: to kill Rita and Bill Smith. Burkhart said that he had protested when Hale had informed him of his intention to blow up the whole house and everyone in it, including his own relatives. Hale told him, What do you care? Your wife will get the money.

  Burkhart said that he went along with Hale’s plan, as he always did. Hale had first approached the outlaws Blackie Thompson and Curley Johnson to do the bloodletting. (In a later statement, Burkhart recalled, “Hale had told me to see Curley Johnson, and to find out how tough he was, and if he wanted to make some money, and told me to tell Johnson the job was to bump a squaw-man”—referring to Bill Smith.) Then, when Johnson and Blackie couldn’t do the job, Hale sought out Al Spencer. After Spencer refused, Hale spoke to the bootlegger and rodeo star Henry Grammer, who promised to provide a man for the job. “Just a few days before the blow-up happened, Grammer told Hale that Acie”—Asa Kirby—“would do it,” Burkhart recalled. “That is what Hale told me.”

  Burkhart said that Lawson had nothing to do with the explosion, explaining, “You have got the wrong pig by the tail.” (Later, Lawson admitted to White, “All that story I told was a lie. All I know about the Smith blow-up was just what I heard in jail….I done wrong and lied.”) In fact, Burkhart indicated that Hale had gone with Grammer to Fort Worth so they would have an alibi. Before leaving, Hale told Burkhart to deliver a message to John Ramsey, the cow thief and bootlegger who worked for Henry Grammer. The message was for Ramsey to tell Kirby that it was time to carry out “the job.” Burkhart delivered the message and was home with Mollie on the night of the explosion. “When it happened I was in bed with my wife,” he recalled. “I saw a light on the north side. My wife went to the window and looked out.” She said that she thought somebody’s house was on fire. “As soon as she said that I knew what it was.”

  Burkhart also provided crucial details about how Hale had arranged the murder of Roan for the insurance money. “I know who killed Henry Roan,” Burkhart said, and he identified Ramsey—the cow thief—as the triggerman.

  The case had broken wide open. White placed a call to Agent Wren, who was out in the field. “There’s a suspect up there named John Ramsey,” White told him. “Take him into custody right away.”

  Ramsey was picked up and brought into the box. He wore overalls over his tall, thin frame; his black hair was greasy, and he walked with a slight, menacing limp. A reporter said he seemed “like a nervy and, perhaps, a dangerous man.”

  According to the accounts of White and other agents, he looked at the agents warily, insisting he didn’t know a thing. Then White laid Burkhart’s signed statement in front of Ramsey, who stared at the paper, as if trying to assess its authenticity. Just as White and Smith had presented Burkhart with Blackie, they now brought in Burkhart to confirm his statement to Ramsey. And Ramsey threw up his hands and said, “I guess it’s on my neck now. Get your pencils.”

  According to his sworn statement and other testimony, sometime in early 1923 Grammer told Ramsey that Hale had “a little job he wanted done.” When Ramsey asked what it was, Grammer said that Hale needed an Indian knocked off. Ramsey, who referred to the plot as “the state of the game,” eventually agreed, and he lured Roan down into the canyon, promising him whiskey. “We sat on the running board of his car and drank,” Ramsey recounted. “The Indian then got in his car to leave, and I then shot him in the back of the head. I suppose I was within a foot or two of him when I shot him. I then went back to my car and drove to Fairfax.”

  White observed the way Ramsey kept saying “the Indian,” rather than Roan’s name. As if to justify his crime, Ramsey said that even now “white people in Oklahoma thought no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724.”

  White still had questions about the murder of Mollie’s sister Anna Brown. Ernest Burkhart remained cagey about the role of his brother Bryan, evidently not wanting to implicate him. But he revealed the identity of the mysterious third man who had been seen with Anna shortly before her death. It was someone whom the agents knew, knew all too well: Kelsie Morrison, their undercover informant who had supposedly been working with the agents to identify the third man. Morrison had not just been a double agent who had funneled information back to Hale and his henchmen. It was Morrison, Ernest said, who had put the fatal bullet in Anna Brown’s head.

  While the authorities went to round up Morrison, they also made sure that a doctor went to check on Mollie Burkhart. She seemed near death, and based on her symptoms, authorities were certain that someone had been secretly poisoning her and doing it slowly so as not to arouse suspicions. In a later report, an agent noted, “It is an established fact that when she was removed from the control of Burkhart and Hale, she immediately regained her health.”

  Burkhart never admitted having any knowledge that Mollie was being poisoned. Perhaps this was the one sin that he couldn’t bear to admit. Or perhaps Hale had not trusted him to kill his own wife.

  The Shoun brothers were brought in and interrogated over what, exactly, they had been treating Mollie with. One of the prosecutors who was working with White asked James Shoun, “Weren’t you giving her insulin?”

  “I may have been,” he said.

  The prosecutor grew impatient. “Wasn’t she taken away from you and taken to the hospital at Pawhuska? Weren’t you administering insulin to her?”

  Shoun said that maybe he’d misspoken: “I don’t want to get balled up and don’t want to get in bad.”

  The prosecutor asked again if he’d administered injections to her. “Yes, I gave her some,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For sugar diabetes.”

  “And she got worse?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And she got so bad she was taken away from you and taken to a hospital at Pawhuska, and she got better immediately under the care of another doctor?”

  James Shoun and his brother denied any wrongdoing, and White could not prove who was responsible for the poisoning. When Mollie was feeling better, she was questioned by authorities. Mollie was not one who liked to be seen as a victim, but for once she admitted that she was scared and bewildered. At times, she relied upon an interpreter to help with her English—a language that now seemed to convey secrets beyond comprehension. An attorney assisting the prosecution explained to her, “We are all your friends and working for you.” He informed her that her husband, Ernest, had confessed that he knew something about these murder cases and that Hale had apparently engineered them, including the bombing of her sister Rita’s house.

  “Bill Hale and your husband are kin-folks, are they not?” he added.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied.

  At one point, the attorney asked her if Hale was at her house around the time of the explosion.

  “No, he was not there. Just my husband and my children was all that was at home.”

  “No one came there that night?”

  “No.” />
  “Was your husband at home all evening?”

  “Yes, all evening.”

  He asked her if Ernest had ever told her anything about Hale’s plot. She said, “He never told me anything about it.” All she wanted, she said, was for the men who did this to her family to be punished.

  “It makes no difference who they are?” the attorney asked.

  “No,” she said adamantly. But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe that Ernest had been involved in such a plot. Later, a writer quoted her saying, “My husband is a good man, a kind man. He wouldn’t have done anything like that. And he wouldn’t hurt anyone else, and he wouldn’t ever hurt me.”

  Now the attorney asked her, “You love your husband?”

  After a moment, she said, “Yes.”

  Once armed with the statements of Ernest Burkhart and Ramsey, White and Agent Smith confronted Hale. White sat across from this gentlemanly-looking figure who, he was convinced, had killed nearly all the members of Mollie’s family and who had killed witnesses and co-conspirators. And White had discovered one more disturbing development; according to several people close to Anna Brown, Hale had had an affair with Anna and was the father of her baby. If true, it meant that Hale had killed his own unborn child.

  White tried to contain the violent passions inside him as Hale greeted him and Agent Smith with the same politeness that he had demonstrated while being arrested. Burkhart once described Hale as the best man you “ever saw until after you found him out and knowed him,” adding, “You could meet and you’d fall in love with him. Women were the same way. But the longer you stayed around him, he’d get to you. He’d beat you some way.”

  White did not waste time. As he later recalled, he told Hale, “We have unquestioned signed statements implicating you as the principal in the Henry Roan and Smith family murders. We have the evidence to convict you.”

  Even after White detailed the overwhelming evidence against him, Hale seemed unperturbed, as if he still held the upper hand. Kelsie Morrison had earlier told agents that Hale was certain that “money will buy the protection or acquittal of any man for any crime in Osage County.”