Killers of the Flower Moon Read online

  Many of the men with whom Tom had served in the Rangers went prematurely to their deaths. Tom saw both inexperienced and veteran officers die. He saw irresponsible lawmen die and conscientious ones, too. Roundtree, who became a deputy sheriff, was shot in the head by a rich landowner. The Ranger with whom Tom argued about usurping the law joined a posse of vigilantes and was accidently shot and killed by one of his own men. Tom’s sergeant was shot six times by an assailant, while a bystander was struck twice. As the sergeant lay on the ground, bleeding, he asked for a slip of paper and scribbled on it a message for Ranger headquarters: “I am shot all to pieces. Everything quiet.” Somehow, he survived his wounds, but the innocent bystander died. Then there was the time that a new recruit in Tom’s company was gunned down while trying to stop an assault. Tom collected the Ranger’s body and transported it to the home of his parents, who couldn’t fathom why their boy was in a box succoring maggots.

  After N. P. Thomas’s death, Tom felt a lawlessness within him. A friend of Tom’s who wrote a short sketch of his life said, “Tom’s emotional struggle was brief but violent. Should he…attempt to avenge [Thomas’s] death?” Tom decided to leave the Rangers altogether and marry Bessie. The adjutant general wrote to Tom’s captain, saying that Tom had “proved an excellent officer” and that he would “regret to see him quit the service.” But his decision was final.

  He and Bessie settled in San Antonio, where the first of their two sons was born. Tom became a railroad detective, and the steady wage made it possible to raise a family. Though he still chased bandits on horseback, the work was generally less dangerous; in many cases, it involved unmasking individuals who had filed false claims for reimbursements. Tom found these people cowards and, therefore, more contemptible than the desperadoes who risked their lives to hold up a train.

  Tom was a dedicated family man, but like his father he was attracted to the darkness, and in 1917 he took the oath to become a special agent of the Bureau of Investigation. He swore, “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies….SO HELP ME GOD.”

  In July 1918, not long after Tom joined the bureau, his brother Dudley went with another Ranger to arrest a pair of deserters in a remote, wooded area in East Texas known as the Big Thicket. It was during an obliterating drought, and amid the dust and heat Dudley and his partner searched a clapboard house where the two wanted men were believed to be hiding out. The suspects weren’t there, so Dudley and his partner decided to wait on the porch. At three in the morning, the darkness was suddenly ablaze with gunfire. The deserters had ambushed them. Dudley’s partner was shot twice, and as he lay bleeding on the porch, he could see Dudley standing and firing one of his six-shooters. Then Dudley was falling, as if someone had undercut his legs, his massive frame smashing against the porch. His partner later recalled that he “fell, and did not get up again.” A bullet had struck Dudley near the heart.

   Tom’s brother Dudley Credit 45

  Tom was overcome by the news; his brother—who was married and had three children under the age of eight—had seemed invulnerable to Tom. The two deserters were caught and prosecuted for murder, and Tom’s father attended each day of the trial until both men were convicted.

  After the shooting, Dudley’s corpse was transported home. A Ranger report noted clinically, “One wagon sheet, one bed sheet, one pillow, used in shipping Ranger White’s body.” Tom and his family retrieved Dudley’s possessions, including the soft-nosed, steel-jacketed bullet that had killed him. He was buried in a cemetery near the ranch where he was born. As the Bible said, “For dust you are and to dust you will return.” An obelisk by his grave read,

  JOHN DUDLEY WHITE, SR

  HDQTRS CO TEXAS RANGERS

  KILLED IN LINE OF DUTY…

  JULY 12, 1918

  Two weeks after the funeral, a cool rain finally began to fall, washing over the prairie. By then, Tom had returned to the Bureau of Investigation.

  14   DYING WORDS

  In September 1925, as White tried to determine what secrets William Hale and his nephews Ernest and Bryan were hiding, he wondered if one person had previously uncovered them: Bill Smith, Mollie Burkhart’s brother-in-law. It was Smith who had first suspected that Lizzie was poisoned, and he who had investigated whether there was a larger conspiracy connected to the family’s oil wealth. If Smith was killed because of what he had learned, that information might be the key to unlocking the inside world.

  After the explosion destroyed the Smiths’ house, agents asked the nurse who had been on duty when Bill was being treated in the hospital whether he had mentioned anything about the murders. She said that Bill had often muttered names in his feverish sleep, but she had been unable to make them out. Sometimes, when he woke up, he seemed worried that he might have said something in his sleep—something that he shouldn’t have. Shortly before Bill died, the nurse recalled, he had met with his doctors, James and David Shoun, and with his lawyer. The doctors had asked the nurse to leave the room. It was clear that they didn’t want her to overhear their conversation with Bill, and she suspected that he had given some sort of statement indicating who was responsible for blowing up his house.

  White, already suspicious of the Shouns owing to the missing bullet in the Anna Brown case, began to question each person who had been in the room with Bill. Later, federal prosecutors also questioned these men. According to a transcript of these interrogations, David Shoun acknowledged that he and his brother had summoned the lawyer, believing that Bill might name his killers, but nothing came of it. “If Bill Smith had an idea who blowed him up, he never said,” the doctor recalled.

  One of the prosecutors pressed him about why it had been so important for the nurse to leave the room. Shoun explained that nurses “often leave when the doctors come in.”

  “If she says that you asked her to step out, she lies?”

  “No, sir. If she says that, I did.” Shoun said he would swear a dozen times that Bill never identified his killers. Pointing to his hat, he added, “Bill Smith gave me that hat, and he is my friend.”

  James Shoun, David’s brother, was equally adamant, telling the prosecutor, “He never did say who blew him up.”

  “He must have talked about that.”

  “He never did say who blew him up.”

  “Did he talk about who blew him up?”

  “He didn’t talk about who blew him up.”

  When Bill Smith’s lawyer was questioned, he, too, insisted that he had no idea who was responsible for blowing up the Smiths’ house. “Gentlemen, it is a mystery to me,” he said. But as he was being grilled, he revealed that in the hospital Bill Smith had said, “You know, I only had two enemies in the world,” and that those enemies were William K. Hale, the King of the Osage Hills, and his nephew Ernest Burkhart.

  The investigators asked James Shoun about this, and eventually he divulged the truth: “I would hate to say positively that he said…that Bill Hale blew him up, but he did say Bill Hale was his only enemy.”

  “What did he say about Ernest Burkhart?” a prosecutor asked.

  “He said they were the only two enemies he knew of.”

  The Shouns were close to Hale and the Burkharts, having been their families’ physicians, and not long after the conversation at the hospital one of the Shoun brothers informed the nurse that Bryan Burkhart was ill. She was asked to visit Bryan at his house, and she agreed to do so. While she was there, Hale showed up. He conferred privately with Bryan, then approached the nurse. After some small talk, he asked her if Bill Smith had named his killers before he died. The nurse told him, “If he did I would not be telling it.” Hale seemed to be trying to ascertain whether she knew anything and, perhaps, to be warning her not to divulge a word if she did.

  As White and agents dug deeper into the hospital statement, they began to suspect that the doctors had orchestrated the private meeting with Bill Smith not for his testimony but, rather, for another, ulterior motive. During t
he meeting, James Shoun was named the administrator of the estate of Bill Smith’s murdered wife, Rita, which allowed him to execute her will. Such a position was coveted by whites, for it paid unconscionably high fees and provided ample opportunities for graft.

  After White’s team uncovered this scheme, one of the prosecutors questioned David Shoun about it. “You understand in your study of medicine the requisite of a dying declaration,” he said. “You weren’t undertaking to get anything like that?”

  “No,” Shoun replied meekly.

  It was now clear why the doctors had summoned not the sheriff or a prosecutor but Bill Smith’s personal attorney. They had asked him to bring the paperwork for Bill to sign before he died.

  Another prosecutor asked David Shoun if Bill was even lucid enough to make such a decision. “Did he know what he was signing?”

  “I suppose he did; he was supposed to be rational.”

  “You are a doctor, was he rational?”

  “He was rational.”

  “And he made arrangements for your brother to be appointed for his wife’s estate?”

  “Yes, sir.” After further interrogation, he conceded, “A very wealthy estate.”

  The more White investigated the flow of oil money from Osage headrights, the more he found layer upon layer of corruption. Although some white guardians and administrators tried to act in the best interests of the tribe, countless others used the system to swindle the very people they were ostensibly protecting. Many guardians would purchase, for their wards, goods from their own stores or inventories at inflated prices. (One guardian bought a car for $250 and then resold it to his ward for $1,250.) Or guardians would direct all of their wards’ business to certain stores and banks in return for kickbacks. Or guardians would claim to be buying homes and land for their wards while really buying these for themselves. Or guardians would outright steal. One government study estimated that before 1925 guardians had pilfered at least $8 million directly from the restricted accounts of their Osage wards. “The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates,” an Osage leader said, adding, “There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.”

  This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves). In 1924, the Indian Rights Association, which defended the interests of indigenous communities, conducted an investigation into what it described as “an orgy of graft and exploitation.” The group documented how rich Indians in Oklahoma were being “shamelessly and openly robbed in a scientific and ruthless manner” and how guardianships were “the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls.” Judges were known to say to citizens, “You vote for me, and I will see that you get a good guardianship.” A white woman married to an Osage man described to a reporter how the locals would plot: “A group of traders and lawyers sprung up who selected certain Indians as their prey. They owned all the officials….These men had an understanding with each other. They cold-bloodedly said, ‘You take So-and-So, So-and-So and So-and-So and I’ll take these.’ They selected Indians who had full headrights and large farms.”

   The Osage chief Bacon Rind protested that “everybody wants to get in here and get some of this money.” Credit 46

  Some of the schemes were beyond depraved. The Indian Rights Association detailed the case of a widow whose guardian had absconded with most of her possessions. Then the guardian falsely informed the woman, who had moved from Osage County, that she had no more money to draw on, leaving her to raise her two young children in poverty. “For her and her two small children, there was not a bed nor a chair nor food in the house,” the investigator said. When the widow’s baby got sick, the guardian still refused to turn over any of her money, though she pleaded for it. “Without proper food and medical care, the baby died,” the investigator said.

  The Osage were aware of such schemes but had no means to stop them. After the widow lost her baby, evidence of the fraud was brought before a county judge, only to be ignored. “There is no hope of justice so long as these conditions are permitted to remain,” the investigator concluded. “The human cry of this…woman is a call to America.” An Osage, speaking to a reporter about the guardians, stated, “Your money draws ’em and you’re absolutely helpless. They have all the law and all the machinery on their side. Tell everybody, when you write your story, that they’re scalping our souls out here.”

  15   THE HIDDEN FACE

  One day that September, the undercover operative who was pretending to be an insurance salesman stopped at a filling station in Fairfax and struck up a conversation with a woman working there. When the operative told her that he was looking to buy a house in the vicinity, she mentioned that William Hale “controlled everything” in these parts. She said that she’d purchased her own home from Hale, which was on the edge of his pasture. One night, she recalled, thousands of acres of Hale’s land had been set on fire. Nothing was left behind but ashes. Most people didn’t know who had started the blaze, but she did: Hale’s workers, on his orders, had torched the land for the insurance money—$30,000 in all.

  White tried to learn more about another suspicious matter: How had Hale become the beneficiary of Henry Roan’s $25,000 life-insurance policy? After Roan turned up with a bullet in the back of his head, in 1923, Hale had the most obvious motive. Yet the sheriff had never investigated Hale, nor had other local lawmen—an oversight that no longer seemed incidental.

  White tracked down the insurance salesman who had originally sold Roan the policy in 1921. Hale had always insisted that Roan, one of his closest friends, had made him the beneficiary because he had lent Roan a lot of money over the years. But the salesman told a different story.

  As the salesman recalled it, Hale had independently pushed for the policy, saying, “Hells bells, that’s just like spearing fish in a keg.” Hale had promised to pay an extra premium on such a policy, and the salesman had responded, “Well, we might write him for $10,000.”

  “No, I want it for $25,000,” Hale said.

  The salesman had told Hale that because he wasn’t Roan’s relative, he could become his beneficiary only if he were his creditor. Hale had said, “Well, he owes me a lot of money, he owes me $10,000 or $12,000.”

  White found it hard to believe that this debt was real. If Roan had really owed Hale that amount of money, then all Hale would have had to do was present proof of the debt to Roan’s wealthy estate, which would have reimbursed him. Hale had no need to get an insurance policy on his friend’s life—a policy that wouldn’t have a significant return unless Roan, who was then in his late thirties, suddenly died.

  The salesman, who was close to Hale, admitted that he had no proof of the debt and that he had simply desired his commission. He was yet another person bound up in the “Indian business.” Roan seemed to have been unaware of these machinations; he trusted that Hale, his supposedly closest friend, was helping him. But there remained one impediment to Hale’s scheme. A doctor had to examine Roan—a heavy drinker who had once wrecked his car while intoxicated—and deem him a safe risk for the insurance company. Though one physician said that nobody would approve that “drunken Indian,” Hale shopped for doctors until he found a man in Pawhuska willing to recommend Roan; one of the seemingly ubiquitous Shoun brothers, James, also recommended Roan.

  White discovered that the insurance company had rejected the first application. A company representative later noted dryly of Hale’s effort to secure a $25,000 policy, “I don’t think it would seem
regular.” Undeterred, Hale approached a second insurance company. The application asked if Roan had previously been turned down by a competitor. The answer “no” was filled in. An insurance agent who reviewed the application later told authorities, “I knew the questions in it had been answered falsely.”

  This time, Hale had produced a creditor’s note to prove that he was owed money by Roan. The debt that Hale had originally claimed—$10,000 or $12,000—had grown inexplicably to $25,000, the exact amount of the insurance policy. The creditor’s note was purportedly signed by Roan and was dated “Jany, 1921”; this was important, because it indicated that the note predated efforts to obtain the insurance, giving legitimacy to Hale’s claim.

  Handwriting and document analysis were emerging tools in the field of criminal investigation. Although many people greeted the new forensic sciences with reverence, attributing to them a godlike power, they were often susceptible to human error. In 1894, the French criminologist Bertillon had helped to wrongfully convict Alfred Dreyfus of treason, having presented a wildly incorrect handwriting analysis. But when applied carefully and discreetly, document and handwriting analysis could be helpful. In the infamous Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murder case, in 1924, investigators had correctly detected similarities between Leopold’s typed school notes and the typed ransom note.

  Agents working on Roan’s murder case later showed the creditor’s note to an analyst at the Treasury Department, who was known as the “Examiner of Questioned Documents.” He detected that the date initially typed on the document had said “June,” and that someone had then carefully rubbed out the u and the e. “Photographs taken by means of slanting light show clearly the roughening and raising of the fibres of the paper about the date due to mechanical erasure,” the examiner wrote. He determined that somebody had replaced the u with an a, and the e with a y so that the date read “Jany.”