Killers of the Flower Moon Page 15

  Eventually, White met with Gregg himself. White liked to take mental notes about the criminals he encountered, in order to fix them in his memory—a skill honed from his time on the frontier when he could not rely on mug shots or fingerprints. Decades later, when White was asked to describe Gregg, he wrote with remarkable precision: “A very small man, I should say 5′6″ and weighed 125 lbs, fair complexion, blue eyes and light brown hair. A good looking youngster.” Gregg’s pretty looks were deceiving, according to a prosecutor, who said that he was “a cold cruel calculating type of criminal” who “would not hesitate to commit murder.” Still, in White’s view, Gregg belonged to that category of outlaw who was not inherently bad and who might even have “gone places” with proper training.

   Dick Gregg had been a member of the Al Spencer Gang. Credit 49

  Though Gregg was known for his nerve as a stickup man, he was reluctant to cross Hale. If word got out, Gregg said, “my life would not be worth a damn.” But, hoping to shave time off his robbery sentence, he agreed to divulge to White and other agents what he knew. Sometime in the summer of 1922, he recalled, the outlaw Al Spencer told him that Hale wanted to meet with the gang, and so Spencer, Gregg, and several associates headed to one of Hale’s pastures near Fairfax. Hale rode up fiercely on his horse, emerging from the tall prairie grasses. The group convened by the edge of a creek and shared some whiskey. Then Hale asked Spencer to step aside with him, and the two went off to talk. After they returned and the meeting broke up, Spencer relayed their conversation.

  Hale told Spencer that he’d pay him and his gang at least $2,000 to bump off a couple—an old man and his blanket, meaning an Indian woman. Spencer asked Hale whom he wanted dead. “Bill Smith and his wife,” he said. Spencer told Hale that he might be cold-blooded but he wouldn’t kill a woman for silver. As he put it, “That’s not my style.” Hale said he hoped that Gregg, at least, would go through with the plan. But Gregg agreed with Spencer.

  White thought that Gregg was being “on the level” and that his refusal to kill for hire showed him to be “an outlaw with some honor.” But though Gregg’s testimony offered the clearest indication yet that Hale had ordered the murders, it was of limited legal value. After all, the statement was coming from a crook seeking to shorten his sentence, and Spencer, the one person who could corroborate Gregg’s testimony, had since been gunned down by a posse of lawmen. (The Pawhuska Daily Capital had reported: WITH $10,000 BONDS IN ONE HAND AND WINCHESTER CLUTCHED IN THE OTHER, FAMOUS BANDIT DIES IN HIS BOOTS WHILE HILLS WHICH GAVE HIM SHELTER IN LIFE ARE HIS SEPULCHER IN DEATH.)

  During one of his interrogations, Gregg said that agents should find Curley Johnson, an outlaw who ran with the stickup man Blackie Thompson. “Johnson knows all about the Smith blow up and will squeal if made to do so,” Gregg promised. But Johnson, it turned out, was also rotting underground. Less than a year earlier, he’d died suddenly—word was of poisoned alcohol.

  White’s desperate search for a witness soon led him to Henry Grammer, the rodeo star and gunslinging bootlegger who, every year or so, seemed to draw down on another man because of a dispute. (HENRY GRAMMER SHOOTS AGAIN, one headline put it.) Though Grammer and Hale generally moved in different circles, White established that they’d known each other for years, from the time when Hale had first appeared in Osage territory, at the turn of the century. In a rodeo contest in 1909, they’d competed with the Osage Cowboys against the Cherokee Cowboys. CHEROKEES NO MATCH FOR THE OSAGE ROPERS, declared the Muskogee Times-Democrat. By 1925, Hale had shed his past, but there remained a faded photograph from the contest; it showed Hale and Grammer sitting proudly on their horses, holding up coiled ropes.

   A photograph of Al Spencer, after he was shot dead on September 15, 1923. Credit 50

   Hale (fourth from left) and Grammer (third from left) competing in a roping contest in 1909 Credit 51

  Just before the Smith house blew up, Hale had told friends that he was heading out of town to attend the Fat Stock Show in Fort Worth, Texas. White looked into Hale’s alibi and was told that Grammer had gone with him. A witness had overheard Hale talking to Grammer before the murders, murmuring something about being ready for “that Indian deal.”

  Like the other potential witnesses against Hale, however, Grammer was dead. On June 14, 1923, three months after the Smiths’ house was demolished, Grammer had been killed when his Cadillac spun out of control and flipped over. The legendary quick-draw artist had bled out on an empty country road.

  Finally, a yegg—a safecracker—gave White and his team the name of another witness to the bombing plot: Asa Kirby, the gold-toothed outlaw who had been an associate of Grammer’s. The yegg said that Kirby was the “soup man”—the expert in explosives—who had designed the bomb. But it turned out that Kirby couldn’t testify, either. A few weeks after Grammer’s fatal car crash, he’d broken into a store in the middle of the night in an attempt to steal a stash of diamonds, only to find that the shopkeeper had been tipped off beforehand and was lying in wait with his 12-gauge shotgun. In an instant, Kirby was blasted into the world beyond. The person who had tipped off the shopkeeper about the robbery, White was hardly surprised to learn, was William K. Hale.

  By foiling the heist, Hale had reinforced his reputation for upholding law and order. But another outlaw told White that Hale had actually set up the robbery—that he’d told Kirby about the diamonds and suggested the ideal time to break in. It was, evidently, a plot within a plot, and White suddenly became suspicious of the litany of dead witnesses. He inquired about Grammer’s car accident and was told by people who knew him that they believed his Cadillac’s steering wheel and brakes had been tampered with. Curley Johnson’s widow, meanwhile, was sure that her husband had been murdered—intentionally poisoned by Hale and his henchmen. And when White learned about a potential witness in the Roan murder case, he discovered that this person had been bludgeoned to death. Anyone who could implicate Hale, it seemed, was being eliminated. The yegg said that Hale was “taking care of too many people,” adding, “I might be taken care of myself.”

  Having failed to locate any living witnesses, White found himself stymied, and Hale seemed aware that agents were onto him. “Hale knows everything,” the informant Morrison had told agents, and there were signs that Morrison might be playing his own duplicitous game. Morrison, agents learned, had told a friend that he had all the dope on the murders and had saved Hale’s “damned neck till now.”

   William Hale Credit 52

  Hale had begun spreading even more patronage to solidify his power. In a report, Agent Wren wrote that Hale was “making all the propaganda he can to favor himself by giving presents, suits of clothes, as well as going on notes”—providing loans—“for different people.” Hale was even “giving ponies away to young boys.”

  One of the undercover operatives who was playing a Texas cattleman had slowly become close with Hale. They shared stories about the old days cowboying, and the operative accompanied Hale as he inspected his herds of cattle. The operative reported that Hale seemed to be mocking investigators. Hale boasted to him, “I’m too slick and keen to catch cold.”

  White would see Hale on the streets of Fairfax, with his bow tie on and his chin up—the incarnation of what White and his brothers, and their father before them, had spent their lives chasing. He carried himself, White thought, “like he owned the world.”

  Sometimes, as the strain on White intensified, as each promising lead dead-ended, he would take his rifle and disappear into the countryside. Spotting a duck or some other flying prey, he would take aim and fire until the air was laced with smoke and blood drained into the soil.

  18   THE STATE OF THE GAME

  Out of the blue, White received a tip. In late October 1925, he was meeting with the governor of Oklahoma, discreetly discussing the case. Afterward, an aide to the governor told White, “We’ve been getting information from a prisoner at McAlester”—the state penitentiary—“who clai
ms to know a great deal about the Osage murders. His name is Burt Lawson. Might be a good idea to talk to him.”

  Desperate for a new lead, White and Agent Frank Smith rushed over to McAlester. They didn’t know much about Lawson, other than that he was from Osage County and that he had had several brushes with the law. In 1922, he had been charged with murdering a fisherman but was acquitted after claiming that the fisherman had first come at him with a knife. Less than three years later, Lawson was convicted of second-degree burglary and sentenced to seven years.

  White liked to interview a subject in a place that was unfamiliar to the person in order to unsettle him, and so he had Lawson taken to a room off the warden’s office. White studied the man who appeared before him: short, portly, and middle-aged, with ghostly white long hair. Lawson kept referring to White and Smith as the “hot Feds.”

  White said to him, “We understand from the governor’s office you know something about the Osage murders.”

  “I do,” Lawson said, adding, “I want to make a clean breast of it.”

  In a series of interviews, Lawson explained that in 1918 he began working as a ranch hand for Bill Smith, and that he grew to know Hale and his nephews Ernest and Bryan Burkhart. In a signed statement, Lawson said, “Some time around the early part of 1921 I discovered an intimacy between my wife and…Smith, which finally developed in breaking up my family and caused me to leave the employment of Smith.” Ernest knew of Lawson’s hatred of Smith, and more than a year later he visited him. Lawson recalled that Ernest “turned to me and said, ‘Burt, I have got a proposition I want to make to you.’ I remarked, ‘What is it, Ernest?’ Ernest said, ‘I want you to blow up and kill Bill Smith and his wife.’ ”

  When Lawson wouldn’t agree to do it, Hale came to see him and promised him $5,000 in cash for the job. Hale told him that he could use nitroglycerin and that all he had to do was place a fuse under the Smiths’ house. “Hale then pulled from his pocket,” Lawson recalled, “a piece of white fuse about three feet and said, ‘I will show you how to use it.’ He then took his pocket knife and cut off a piece about six inches long…then took a match from his pocket and lighted the end.”

  Lawson still said no, but shortly after he was arrested for killing the fisherman, Hale—who, as a reserve deputy sheriff, could come in and out of the jail as he pleased—visited him again and said, “Burt, you will be needing some attorneys pretty soon and I know you haven’t got any money to pay them with, and I want that job pulled.”

  Lawson said, “All right Bill, I’ll pull it.”

  One night not long after, Lawson recalled, another deputy sheriff opened his cell and led him to Hale, who was in a car outside. Hale drove Lawson to a building in Fairfax, where Ernest was waiting. Hale told Ernest to get “the box,” and Ernest brought out a wooden container. Inside was a jug filled with nitroglycerin; a long coiled fuse was attached to the spout. After carefully loading the box in the car, the three of them made their way to the Smiths’ house. “I got out and took the box and fuse, and Hale and Ernest drove on away,” Lawson recounted. “I then went in the back way and into Smith’s cellar, and placed the box in the far corner of the cellar, then laid the fuse out like Hale told me….I then sat down in the dark and waited.” Lawson continued, “I saw the lights turned on. I suppose they all undressed and went to bed for pretty soon the lights went out. I sat there for quite a while, I had no way to tell what time it was, but I would figure it was about three quarters of an hour, and after I thought they were all asleep, I lighted a short piece of fuse….As soon as the long end began to smoke, I beat it as fast I could.” He could hear the house breaking apart. Hale and Ernest picked him up in a spot nearby and returned him to the jail, where the other deputy sheriff snuck him into his cell. Before Hale left, he’d warned Lawson, “If you ever cheep this to anybody we will kill you.”

  White and Agent Smith felt a rush of excitement. There were still questions. Lawson had not mentioned the involvement of Kirby, the soup man. But Kirby could have prepared the bomb for Hale without interacting with Lawson. White would need to tie up these loose ends, but at last a witness had emerged who could directly implicate Hale in the plot.

  On October 24, 1925, three months after White took over the case, he sent Hoover a telegram, unable to conceal a sense of triumph: “Have confession from Burt Lawson that he placed and set off the explosive that blew up Bill Smith’s home; that he was persuaded, prompted and assisted to do it by Ernest Burkhart and W. K. Hale.”

  Hoover was elated. Via telegram, he quickly sent White a message: “Congratulations.”

  As White and his men worked to corroborate the details in Lawson’s confession, they felt a growing urgency to get Hale and his nephews off the streets. The attorney and guardian Comstock, who White no longer doubted was helping investigators by persuading witnesses to talk, had begun to receive threats to his life. He was now sleeping in his office, in downtown Pawhuska, with his .44-caliber English Bulldog by his side. “Once, when he went to open the window, he found sticks of dynamite behind the curtain,” a relative recalled. He was able to dispose of them. But, the relative added, “Hale and his bunch were determined to kill him.”

  White was also very concerned about the fate of Mollie Burkhart. Although White had received reports that she was sick with diabetes, he was suspicious. Hale had successfully arranged, corpse by corpse, for Mollie to inherit the majority of her family members’ wealth. Yet the plot seemed unfinished. Hale had access to Mollie’s fortune through Ernest, but his nephew did not yet directly control it, and would do so only if Mollie died and bequeathed it to him. A servant in Mollie’s house had told an agent that one night Ernest had muttered to her while drunk that he was afraid something would happen to Mollie. Even Ernest seemed terrified of the plan’s inevitable denouement.

  John Wren, the Ute agent, had recently spoken to Mollie’s priest, who said that she had stopped coming to church, which was unlike her, and that he had heard she was being forcibly kept away by family members. The priest was sufficiently alarmed that he had broken the tenet of parishioner confidentiality. Soon after, the priest reported that he had received a secret message from Mollie: she was afraid that someone was trying to poison her. Given that poisoned whiskey had been one of the killers’ preferred methods, the priest sent word back warning Mollie “not to drink any liquor of any kind under any circumstances.”

  But Mollie’s diabetes seemed to have provided an even more devious way to deliver the poison. Some of the town’s doctors, including the Shoun brothers, had been giving her injections of what was supposed to be insulin, but instead of improving, Mollie seemed to be getting worse. Government officials working for the Office of Indian Affairs were also concerned that Mollie was slowly being poisoned. A Justice Department official had noted that her “illness is very suspicious, to say the least.” It was urgent, the official went on, to “get this patient to some reputable hospital for diagnosis and treatment free from the interference of her husband.”

  By the end of December 1925, White felt that he could no longer wait. He had not finished confirming many details in Lawson’s confession, and there remained certain contradictions. In addition to Lawson having made mention of Kirby, he had insisted that Hale was in Fairfax at the time of the explosion rather than in Fort Worth with Grammer, as some witnesses had claimed. Nevertheless, White rushed to obtain arrest warrants for Hale and Ernest Burkhart for the murders of Bill and Rita Smith and their servant Nettie Brookshire. The warrants were issued on January 4, 1926. Because agents could not make arrests, they fanned out with U.S. marshals and other lawmen, including Sheriff Freas, who, after being expelled from office, had been reelected to the position.

  Several lawmen quickly located Ernest Burkhart at his favorite dive, a pool hall in Fairfax, and transported him to the jail in Guthrie, eighty miles southwest of Pawhuska. Hale, however, could not be found. Agent Wren learned that he had ordered a new suit of clothes and had said that he was plannin
g to leave town at a moment’s notice. Authorities feared that Hale had disappeared for good when he suddenly strolled into Sheriff Freas’s office. He looked as if he were heading to a formal party: he wore a perfectly pressed suit, shoes shined to a gleam, a felt hat, and an overcoat with his diamond-studded Masonic lodge pin fastened to the lapel. “Understand I’m wanted,” he said, explaining that he was there to turn himself in—no need to put the fellas out.

  As he was taken to the jail in Guthrie, he was confronted by a local reporter. Hale’s deep-set eyes burned, and he moved, in the words of the reporter, “like a leashed animal.”

   Hale in front of the Guthrie jail Credit 53

  The reporter asked him, “Have you a statement to make?”

  “What are you?” Hale demanded, not used to being questioned.

  “A newspaperman.”

  “I’ll not try my case in the newspapers, but in the courts of this county.”

  Hoping Hale might at least talk about himself, the reporter asked, “How old are you?”

  “I’m fifty-one years of age.”

  “How long have you been in Oklahoma?”

  “Twenty-five years, more or less.”

  “You are pretty well known, aren’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Have large numbers of friends?”

  “I hope so.”