they’ve got me.” The friend who had accompanied him to
Grammer’s ranch came to see him. “He just kind a jabbered,” the
friend recalled. “I couldn’t understand anything he said.”
After nearly two days, Bill regained consciousness. He asked
about Rita. He wanted to know where she was buried. David
Shoun said he thought that Bill, fearing he might die, was about to
make a declaration—to reveal what he knew about the bombing
and the killers. “I tried to get it out of him,” the doctor later told
authorities. “I said, ‘Bill, have you any idea who did it?’ I was
anxious to know.” But the doctor said Bill never did disclose
anything relevant. On March 14, four days after the bombing, Bill
Smith died—another victim of what had become known as the
Osage Reign of Terror.
A Fairfax newspaper published an editorial arguing that the
bombing was beyond comprehension—“beyond our power to
realize that humans would stoop so low.” The paper demanded
that the law “leave no stone unturned to ferret out the
perpetrators and bring them to justice.” A firefighter at the scene
had told Ernest that those responsible for this “should be thrown
in the fire and burned.”
In April 1923, Governor Jack C. Walton of Oklahoma dispatched
his top state investigator, Herman Fox Davis, to Osage County. A
lawyer and a former private detective with the Burns agency, Davis
had a groomed sleekness. He puffed on cigars, his eyes shining
through a veil of blue smoke. A law-enforcement official called
him the epitome of a “dime-novel detective.”
Many Osage had come to believe that local authorities were
colluding with the killers and that only an outside force like Davis
could cut through the corruption and solve the growing number of
cases. Yet within days Davis was spotted consorting with some of