W. W. Vaughan with his wife and several of their children Credit
32All efforts to solve the mystery had faltered. Because of
anonymous threats, the justice of the peace was forced to stop
convening inquests into the latest murders. He was so terrified
that merely to discuss the cases, he would retreat into a back room
and bolt the door. The new county sheriff dropped even a pretense
of investigating the crimes. “I didn’t want to get mixed up in it,” he
later admitted, adding cryptically, “There is an undercurrent like a
spring at the head of the hollow. Now there is no spring, it is gone
dry, but it is broke way down to the bottom.” Of solving the cases,
he said, “It is a big doings and the sheriff and a few men couldn’t
do it. It takes the government to do it.”
In 1923, after the Smith bombing, the Osage tribe began to urge
the federal government to send investigators who, unlike the